Silhouettes

Joined: 26 Oct 2006 Posts: 53

I wanted to take a few silhouette photos. I don’t have much experience and expensive equipment. I know that if one wants a silhouette image, the lighting source should be behind the subject. I would appreciate if you will extend on this technique or describe other techniques for shooting silhouettes. And I also have some nice b&w photos which I would like to make silhouettes of. So do you know any ways to do it in Photoshop? I will appreciate any information. Probably you know some good tutorials. Thanks.

Joined: 02 Jan 2007 Posts: 190

the most natural silhouettes are going to done in camera not photoshop.

What you are doing is telling the camera to expose for the backdrop/scene of the photo and not the subject. When you point your camera at your subject, it gives you a a shutter speed and aperture to properly expose your image. If you look at a backlit photo of someone standing with the sun behind them, generally the sky will be blown out on these shots because more light is needed to properly expose the subject. This results in the blown sky and highlights in the background because the film/sensor received way too much light to accurately represent the background...but it was necessary for the subject to look right.

Silhouettes are the opposite. You are aiming to expose correctly for the sky and in doing so, renders your subject, let's say a person, completely underexposed and gives you the effect you're after.

To do this, you want to become familiar with the way your camera meters a scene. You then meter for the sky (or the bright highlighted background) and lock-in the settings that your camera has selected. your camera most likely will have a meter lock so you can recompose your shot and keep the same shutter and aperture values.

Or you can take note of the values picked by your camera and throw it into full manula mode and dial the same ones in. Then from there, you're setup to retake as many as you need to get your shot, provided the camera picked a good combo to begin with.

HTH!!

Joined: 25 Jun 2006 Posts: 247

I would add to that the use of the sun behind the subject, preferably late afternoon when it's near the horizon. The sun is so bright that an automatic light meter will be forced to overcompensate, to keep the sun from burning the picture. The result will be a beautiful silhouette against a yellow or orange sun. If you set to underexpose by a stop or two, you'll get richer colors still.