How To Photograph Silhouettes

I received a lot of positive feedback on the above shot from my sunflower field session, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to show you how I capture silhouettes.

First: turn off your flash and ditch the reflectors. This is one situation where you’re not going to need to expose your subject.  Remember this post on backlighting? Well for silhouettes, we are going to do the exact opposite. Instead of metering for the face, you’re going to meter for the bright light source behind your subject.  This will cause everything else – including your subject- to be underexposed.  You may still need to tweak it in Photoshop so that it looks like a true silhouette. I do that by increasing my blacks in the curves panel.

Now that we know what how to create the look, it’s time to perfect it.  The key is to make the shapes as distinct as possible. Since this was not a flat surface with an unobstructed view (like a beach), we went to the highest point of the field to shoot this picture.  It also helped that I got as low as I could to the ground.The next thing I did was to place the family apart from one another, still holding hands, but far enough away from each other so they didn’t look like a giant indistinguishable blog.  Side note: I initially wasn’t thrilled with the way the tiniest member was blending in with the field, so I had her stand on crate allowing her to set herself apart from the background. Even though I shot this in color, I prefer the simplicity of a BW edit for these types of shots. And there you have it….a family silhouette!