How to take a silhouette photo

Lead: Silhouette photos and black-and-white photos have always been sought after by people because of their strong artistic expression effect. Let's take a look at how to take a silhouette photo.

1, choose the topic carefully.

Before considering the technical details and camera settings, you need to make time and energy to consider choosing the object. This will be a tricky thing, because you need some experience to make a proper choice. You will want the object to be relatively simple and show a completely different shape from the surrounding environment in two-dimensional space. The natural charm of silhouette shooting is that you will peel off all the details of the object and blend in with the surrounding environment, showing almost no sense of depth of field.

Step 2 pay attention to the perspective

When shooting, it should be noted that the subject must not be rigid, and should not be blocked by annoying buildings or simple sculptures. In addition, be careful if there are many people shooting pictures. If the silhouette overlaps too much, it will give people a sense of confusion and ambiguity. In shooting, try to make every object clearly identifiable, even from the perspective of a single object.

3. Overlapping trends

What are the subjects you usually see? Kissing silhouette? Two of them hugged and kissed each other, but the final shooting result was a bit strange because of the excessive overlap of faces.

If you want to imitate this kind of shooting, try to do it? Coincidence The face was not touched before and after kissing to get better performance. Remember, this principle is not only necessary for silhouette, but also applicable to any two objects with overlapping tendency in photographic works.

4. Lighting equipment

Obviously, silhouette is a masterpiece of backlight. The basic idea behind this is, what are your prospects? Object profile? Compared with the background brightness, the brightness can be ignored. To understand the mystery, you must learn to be like a camera? Think and observe it? Things.

If you accidentally take a silhouette, you will know that what the camera sees is completely different from what you see. Sometimes under bright backlight conditions, the subject seen by the naked eye is still good, but the final shot is a silhouette. The fundamental reason for this gap is that cameras are very different from human eyes.

Now let's take a look at two basic types of lighting scenes when taking silhouette shots.

Lighting scene 1: studio

Silhouette shooting is the easiest to control in the studio as long as you have the right equipment. Generally speaking, you should design the background to be very concise and consistent, and form a strong contrast with the silhouette as much as possible. So grab the lighting background and put the studio lights on it. Next, put all these behind the main body and keep a certain distance from the shooting picture.

If you want to control the tone and expression of the photo besides highlighting the outline of the object, you can try to add bright colors and try the expression effect of halo map.

Silhouette shooting is the easiest to control in the studio as long as you have the right equipment. Generally speaking, you should design the background to be very concise and consistent, and form a strong contrast with the silhouette as much as possible. So grab the lighting background and put the studio lights on it. Next, put all these behind the main body and keep a certain distance from the shooting picture.

If you want to control the tone and expression of the photo besides highlighting the outline of the object, you can try to add bright colors and try the expression effect of halo map.

Lighting Scene 2: Natural Environment

Silhouette shooting in uncontrollable environment may have more unpredictability, and the external light conditions change rapidly. The shooting effect is closely related to the degree of adjustment. In fact, it is difficult to shoot effectively with sunlight for most of the day. This also explains why you will see that 90% or even more outdoor silhouettes are taken around sunrise or sunset. From a natural point of view, the sun at these times is at the lowest point of the sky trajectory, and it is most disturbed by the atmosphere at this height, and the sun will be covered by clouds, thus producing very ideal and usually richer background light.

But as mentioned above, unlike shooting in a studio environment, the change of the position of the sun on the horizon will soon affect the actual lighting conditions, and the pressure will be greater when shooting naturally. Do you really want to shoot in full manual mode? Do two things at the same time? , always pay attention to the change of light, constantly adjust. Therefore, you must know the ideal setting of the camera like the back of your hand. Only in this way can you make corresponding incremental changes without wasting time because your eyes leave the viewfinder. But unfortunately, perfect lighting conditions, such as the blink of an eye, are usually difficult to seize such a good shooting opportunity.