Tutorial: How to Take Silhouettes

These photos were taken at an old country church. My friend was throwing a birthday party for her daughter in the church recreation room. I knew the church was special to my friend and I wanted to take a silhouette of her daughter praying in the church window. I took several exposures of my own daughters to experiment. In some I had a completely white background and completely black foreground, but when I looked at the images I liked the photos where you could see some of the color of the blue sky at dusk and a little of that light falling on the subject.





Taking silhouettes is an example of manipulating the camera to get the exposure you want. In normal circumstances the camera wants the subject to exposed correctly, but you don't want it to do that in this instance. So you will have to use the manual setting to override the camera's 'brain'.

To try this take your camera and turn it on spot meter. Point it toward your light source (window or sunset for example) and take a photo. View the image on your camera and look at the settings the camera used (refer to your camera manual if you don't know how to do this). Write down the F/Av (aperture) number and S (Shutter speed) the camera used, then turn the camera to manual. Turn the dials on your camera until you get those same Av and SS numbers on the screen. Your subject should have less light on it than the light behind it. Had the church been very bright or if I used a camera flash this wouldn't have worked. Set your subject in front of the light source, focus on it, and take the photo. You can turn the shutter speed up or down a few clicks to experiment if you want your silhouette more or less defined.



I hope you have fun experimenting! Always feel free to email me with questions if you have trouble. My email can be found in my profile to the right side of this page.