Art-SX

Photographing silhouettes can be both challenging and rewarding. A subject in silhouette is viewed in its most simple and elegant form, and distracting details are eliminated. The difficulty that many photographers face when shooting silhouettes is arriving at the proper exposure. When shooting with the camera set on automatic, the camera's light meter may arrive at an undesirable exposure that underexposes the image. This results when bright horizons give false cues to the light meter.

My technique for shooting silhouettes is to set the camera on manual exposure mode; then using a center-weighted exposure reading, I aim the center of my frame toward the middle tone of the composition. In this photograph, for instance, I took an exposure reading off the sky just in front of the photographer's head.

“In otherwise impossible lighting conditions, you can often look around and find something that is being lit indirectly and get very usable images that way”