Jun 29, 2013

Silhouettes add value to your portfolio

Your first silhouette image was probably a mistake. You were shooting your subject against the sun or a bright sky. What you got was an underexposed foreground and a brightly lit background. Even though you made a mistake, you probably said that you would like to do it again. But how?

It's easy to deliberately create silhouettes is you understand a few simple techniques. 

A silhouette is an image representing the outline of a subject with out any interior details. Silhouettes are usually black but can be any color. You often see them representing a profile that is cut from black paper glued to a white background. It's a simple form of portraiture that was popular in the 18th Century.

In photography, you can achieve the same result by backlighting your subject. In other words, put your subject against a bright background and meter for the background. Sounds easy, but there are a few tricks that can help you control the technique. 

Cemetery in Queens, NY

Setting the camera on automatic makes the process harder because the camera wants to make a "perfect" picture by adjusting aperture and speed. So the first thing to learn how to do is to make this adjustments on your own. If you use a DSLR, just change the setting to "A" or aperture mode, or "M" for manual. Many advanced point and shoots allow you to do that, too. You can set your aperture to F8 through F16 to control depth of field. 

Secondly, learn to manually focus with your lenses. You don't have to shoot in "Manual" mode on your camera, you just have to switch your lens to manual. This is important because your subject may be off center and you need to control the focus point and maintain it even if you point to another area in the frame. If you have enough depth of field, a wider area of the image will be in focus. 

Even though you can't manually adjust a lens on many point and shoot cameras, there are ways to get around that limitation. Holding the shutter button down half way after you focus on your subject, will hold the focus point, but then you can move the camera so it reads the light coming from the background. 

Sunrise on the Ganges River, India

Once you have that set up, the camera will continue to try to give you a "perfect" picture by adjusting the speed to allow more or less light to reach the sensor. If the shutter speed adjusts for the subject, it will stay open longer to let more light in. If it adjusts for the background it will let less light reach the sensor. That's the trick. The camera has to believe that the background is what you're after. That's easily done if you can control your camera settings manually. Expose for the background, then focus on the foreground object. 

Fire Island Lighthouse at dusk
Statue of Aphrodite in Santorini, Greece
















You can create silhouettes with flash, strobes or controllable spots like those workshop halogens available in most hardware supply stores. Here are three images. The first one is back lit but I used spot meter to meter the Uncle Sam bobble head. The middle image was created by taking a reading of the light coming in from a sliding door through a white cloth drape but not on Uncle Sam. The third image was created by bouncing the light from an off-camera flash on a light green wall behind the bobblehead. I could have done a better job with the third one by diffusing the light a little more and controlling the direction of the light beam, but you get the point.




Conditions aren't always right for creating silhouettes when you are out doors, but you can create the right light in the studio. Everyone should take some time to become familiar with this technique. It can help expand your creativity and help you see form, shape and light.


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