Photography is said to be the art of drawing with light. In digital photography, the amount of light can greatly alter the quality of the images you shoot. While you can take pretty pictures even in low light, most cameras can't handle such situations without compromising on image quality. What this effectively means is that if you try to get the hues right, you might have to reduce the shutter speed of your camera, ending up with either shaky images or photographs with a lot of grain. However, if you are open to experimenting a bit with your camera settings, silhouette photography can be interesting to try.

Although you can convert any photograph into a silhouette using applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, not everyone is comfortable with manipulating and editing images using complex software. Keeping that in mind, here are a few tips to help you capture silhouette shots from your camera directly.

Preferred Gear: Any point-and-shoot snapper or semi-SLR that lets you edit shutter speed, aperture settings, and ISO values should suffice. DSLRs with kit lenses work well too, but a prime lens is preferred, because it keeps flaws such as barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting at a tolerable minimum. Using a tripod, however, is optional.

Level Of Difficulty: Intermediate.

Equipment Used: To capture shots for this tutorial, my weapon of choice was a Canon 550D with a Canon 50mm fixed-focus prime lens and a UV filter. Since I shot these images in the Camera RAW mode, I have converted them to JPEG using Adobe Lightroom. If you are looking for a free application instead, IrfanView can handle a variety of camera RAW formats very well.

Technique: Silhouettes are an interesting technique of photography that usually set a tone of melancholy. Wherever you decide to shoot, the technique you employ will determine how clear your silhouettes are. Even when shooting in broad daylight, the dark shapes that result may give your photos a mellow mood. The trick to capturing sharp silhouettes is to frame your shot with the lens directly facing your primary light source. For outdoor shots, this is obviously the sun.

Depending on how bright the light source is, the opening of the aperture (F-stop value), ISO, and shutter speed (exposure time) need to be adjusted. If the scene is not dimly lit, you can set the ISO level to as low as 100 — lower the ISO, lesser the noise. You can set your F-stop at as low as 1.8 and still manage to get a sharp outline at shutter speeds of 1/250.

Another technique is to set the aperture value as high as possible — that way, lesser light falls on the camera's sensor. In this case, make sure that the ISO is set between 200 and 400, so that you can keep noise to a manageable minimum. As you don't want the sensor to gather too much light, your shutter speed can be as high as 1/4000. 

Your camera settings will depend on how strong the light is, so keep in mind that your light meter or exposure value displayed on the LCD screen should be between -1.5 and -0.5. This can be adjusted by tweaking the shutter speed. The final exposure value can be determined only when you have focussed on the subject. If you go any lower than -1.5 though, your image will be heavily underexposed and will turn out completely black.

Try out this effect and share your shots and experience with us. Here are a few sample pictures for your viewing pleasure.

 

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