With this post I’d like to describe in layman’s terms how to take a silhouette shot, as well as tell you how I think your collection of photos can benefit from a couple well done silhouettes.
First, let’s understand what a silhouette is:
“A silhouette is a view of some object or scene consisting of the outline and a featureless interior, with the silhouette usually being black.” Source – Wikipedia.org
As you can see in my photo above, the subjects (the people) appear featureless as described, with much of the detail coming from the background (skyline/ horizon). Now, there are definitely variations on this technique, so keep that in mind and make sure you take into account some other examples I will include in this post.
How do you take a silhouette you ask? Or maybe you didn’t, but if you are curious on how to black out the subjects, I will now begin to explain. In this article, I will essentially mirror a bit of Digital Photography School (so here is your credit DPS!) because I mean there really isn’t that many different techniques. I figured it out on my own, but I will blend my process with their explanation.
In the scene above, I was set up behind the subjects I wanted to shoot. This was fine, because I didn’t care too much about capturing their faces or what was going on in their world. The important part about the direction I am facing is that it is in the direction of the light source. This is your number one priority. Shoot with the light source behind your subject. There is a slight catch however – you have to force the camera to meter the light areas of the composition. This, I found, can be done in two ways.
1) You can try the good ‘ole focusing trick where you half press the shutter on the bright spots to adjust the metering and then re-focus on the subject(s) and keep the same metering…snap the picture.
2) This is harder, and probably unnecessary, but…you can focus on the subject first, then with the shutter half pressed, scan to a bright area to get the meter read and come back to the subject, adjust the shutter speed and snap the photo….(stupid huh?….lol)
As an aside, in extreme bright sources, you can meter on just about anything and get the same effect.
The end message is you want to underexpose your subject while correctly exposing the backgroud (i.e. everything else). That’s really it on what I have to say about technique…my biggest piece of advice in all cases is to EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT. You will learn a lot! With that out of the way, some interesting take-aways from the DPS article are:
1.) Choose a strong subject.
2.) Turn off your flash.
5.) Make silhouetted shapes distinct and uncluttered.
Those are three things I didn’t really describe in detail, but you can find the article here: How to Photograph Silhouettes
Above is a photo that I took, but below are some more examples that you can find in the link directly above this sentence:
Make sure you visit the article and find out who the original photographers were…I’m not a fan of stealing content without paying tribute.
Lastly, I think that silhouettes are a great add-in to your portfolio. Why? Well, it showcases the grasp of another technique that can do wonders when executed correctly. On top of that, silhouettes have the ability to express certain things easier than do their regularly exposed counterparts. There is much more mystery and intrigue in a subject which we can’t totally understand due to the lack of details. There is an eloquent simplicity in picturing a story from a blacked out subject and using the background as your setting. I just think there is a wealth of creativity that can spur from this technique, so give it a shot!
Also check out 12 Super Silhouette Shots at DPS as well. I hope this helped…let me know if you have any questions!