Silhouettes

Silhouettes are somewhat counter-intuitive to me. On the technical side of photography, I focus so much on brightening the face. That means, I constantly am metering on the face and adjusting everything to make sure the FACE is light. My style of photography is to have bright eyes, so I often overexpose my pictures slightly.

The focus of a silhouette is darkness and hiding the details of the face. You want the subjects to be sharp and in focus, yet you must focus and meter behind the subject.

There are a few simple rules that I think you must follow with silhouettes:

1)      Shooting in manual is KEY.

2)      Pick a simple backdrop so the focus is on the subject and there isn’t too much distraction that takes away from what the purpose of what the silhouette is.

3)      Sunrises or sunsets are ideal times as the sun is low in the sky and a perfect backdrop.

4)      Think about the emotion and moment you are capturing when staging a silhouette.

5)      Post-processing can be your friend.

I used my 15 month old daughter as an example. She is in a stage of discovery. She loves to point out things and observe. She’s like a little sponge just absorbing the world. She also is a lucky little girl and has super long eyelashes. She most likely will grow into her lashes, but they just seem so long right now. The hair on her head is really fine and wispy and she sort of has a mullet. And…she sucks her thumb A LOT. She puts anything and everything else in her mouth too. So, when I was taking her pictures, I wanted to capture these things. I also brought dad and brother along too. Our kids’ special thing these days is my husband throwing them into the air. My son could seriously do this all day long.

The biggest challenges of silhouettes:

1)      If you shoot in automatic focus, and you are wanting your subject to be in focus, your camera may have a hard time focusing in such dark light.  You may need to switch to manual focus (but I find this difficult with kids who don’t want to sit still).

2)      I find myself moving around a lot to avoid strange clouds or other people in the background (if you are in a public place).

3)      With sunset and sunrise, you are in a race against the light.

These were taken at Gasworks Park on Thursday evening. Because I waited a little too long and there was a lot of cloud coverage, my ISO was set at 800. I didn't have anything specific in the background that I wanted in focus, so I set my aperture at 2.8. With silhouettes, there is a lot of shifting in shutter speed to make sure the light behind the subject is blasting out the details of the subject. I have posted the shutter speed on each photo.

I love how the silhouette draws you into the connection of her little fingers reaching out to my husbands hands.  Shutter Speed 1/4000

Love those eyelashes.  Shutter Speed 1/4000.

Pointing out a seaplane landing over Lake Union.  In just 5 minutes, I had lost a lot of light, so I needed to adjust the shutter speed to 1/100 to allow more light in.

I metered on her face in this one as I wanted to capture her sucking her thumb in deep thought.  Shutter Speed 1/60.  Note that there is not much of an adjustment in Shutter Speed, but the focus in the picture is so different between this picture and the previous one.

And some play time with daddy. 

Shutter Speed 1/60.  Note that this picture and the previous picture have the same settings but the below picture was taken about 5 minutes later.  The lighting was quickly disappearing.