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19 examples of silhouette photography

Photocrowd

Posted on January 8th, 2018

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Shooting silhouettes is a sure-fire way to add visual interest and atmosphere to your images. We take a look at some of the best silhouette images on Photocrowd

'There's a Storm Coming' by Chris Evans, Nikon D800, 38mm, 1/50sec at f/14, ISO 400

Silhouettes are a great method for bringing dramatic impact to your images, whether they’re wildlife, street or documentary photography. Silhouettes are particularly good to create around this time of year when the low light of winter will give you excellent conditions in which to work.

It’s important to ensure the subject you intend to render as a silhouette has a distinctive shape that will possess a recognisable outline. Popular subjects to capture in images like this include, stags, cyclists, birds and, as you’ll see in the examples below, figures moving through the streets. All these subjects are instantly familiar to your audience.

To put it simply, you create a silhouette by setting your camera to manual, and underexposing your main subject when it is positioned in front of a bright light source. By exposing for the background light source, not the main subject, the subject will be rendered as a solid block of shadow.

If you have any unwanted details in your silhouetted subject then reduce the exposure further. However, if you find this reduces the exposure too much in other areas of your image then you can always remove the unwanted details in post-processing using the burn tool.

One of the key issues that photographers new to this technique can face is how to accurately focus. You usually want both the silhouetted subject and the background of the image to be sharp. Your best option is to set your lens to manual focus and set your aperture to around f/11, which will give good depth of field and should give some leeway for focusing. Remember also to keep your ISO as low as possible (note that all of the images below have ISOs of between 100 and 800). Noise is particularly noticeable in shadow areas and can be very difficult or impossible to fix in post.