Silhouettes

So this musing is going to be on Silhouettes and how to take more of them in your photography.

A silhouette depicts a form or shape where the outline is clearly defined but with no detail visible within the shape or outline which is normally depicted as a solid black, sometimes you may have a partial silhouette as in the holiday sunset photograph below where some detail is still visible. They became popular in the mid 1700s, were normally cut from black card set onto a lighter background and usually depicted the profile or side view of a person for a very good reason, more on this below! One of the reasons they became so popular was because before the days of photography, which wasn’t invented until Louis Daguerre took the first photograph around 1838, there weren’t many ways you could get a likeness of a person other then a portrait painting, which would have been expensive, or a drawing. A skilled artist could cut a silhouette in a few minutes and so they were relatively cheap as a piece of art. In fact the word silhouette derives from the name of a French politician who was renowned for cutting budgets and spending and so was associated with something done cheaply.

I like to take silhouettes in my photography as they just add more interest, variety, you see fewer photos of them, there’s a certain mystique involved, especially in portrait photography as you can’t see what the person looks like. Before I explain my technique for taking silhouettes first just a sentence or two on how they are created. A silhouette is formed when the light falling on a subject is darker than the light behind them so not all environments or situations are suitable to achieve one, which probably adds to their visual appeal. So out in a park or a beach on a bright sunny afternoon with everything bathed in the same light is not going to be the best situation. Where as a dark room with a window, near the entrance of a tunnel or a cave, under the shade of a tree with the sun setting opposite is ideal.

My technique then for taking silhouettes is to first recognise that a silhouette is possible as above. I then put my camera into spot meter mode and point the camera at a bright part of the scene (you can see more on metering here). I then press and hold the AE/AF On button, most modern dslr cameras have this. The AE stands for auto exposure and the AF stands for auto focus, this button can lock both exposure and focus together or separately, you can select which one it locks in your cameras menu and for this technique you should set it to AE only, basically what you are doing is enabling your camera to expose for a certain part of the scene (the brighter background) but to focus on something else (the darker subject). This then locks the exposure to that bright part of the sky which allows me to then recompose the shot with the subject in the position I want. I then point the camera at my subject and half press the shutter, the camera will focus on the subject and most importantly, because I have held the AE On button, the exposure doesn’t change, it’s almost as if you’ve “fooled” the camera into thinking that the total scene is much brighter than it really is and so it renders the parts that were already darker, your subject, darker still and so causes the silhouette. Sometimes I might use exposure compensation of -1 stop to get an even darker subject.

I touched on above that artists who cut silhouettes normally cut a side view or profile of a person for the very good reason that from a profile shape it was possible to recognise the sitter, if they had cut with a straight on view it would have been just the shape of a round head with two ears sticking out the sides. It’s really, really important that when you do a silhouette that you get a clearly defined shape otherwise all you’ll get is a black blob. So when taking a silhouette of a person make sure they are in profile or doing something like a star jump, make sure their arms are away from their body to create gaps the light behind them can show through, this way you’ll ensure you get much more interesting silhouettes. Also remember there can’t be anything between your subject and the brighter background.

Here are some examples of full and partial silhouettes from my own photography.