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The beautiful silhouette


The silhouette is a shot that never crops up in personal photobooks and if it does it's a mistake.

Why do we the refrain from shooting silhouettes? Well, when we usually take snaps of people we're naturally looking to want to capture the human emotion and with landscapes and objects we're looking at their equivalent of emotion: detail.

A silhouette renders detail obsolete but that doesn't mean it's devoid of emotions. Silhouettes can make for high-impact photography because they simplify things. It's about that one defining image.

When it comes to shooting silhouettes, you will need a strong subject to be sat in front of a source of light. This immediately darkens the main feature of the shot, thereby creating a silhouette.

Keep the flash off for the simple reasons that the idea of a flash is to compensate for the lack of natural light. With the flash on you light up the subject. There can be no silhouette with a well lit environment.

This lighting technique is almost an exception to the rule of what constitutes a "well-lit" picture. Usually we ask light to be thrown from the front and sides, but never the back because it overpowers the subject. With silhouettes we want that.

Think minimalism. The best and most memorable silhouette shots are the ones that are unfussy.

An example is from the American film noir movie the Big Combo, which was shot in 1955. At the end of the movie there's a woman and a man, silhouetted by the mixture of fog and light around an airport hangar. It's iconic.

The thing about this shot is the composition. It's perfectly framed. Just because you're emphasising one particular style of photography – the silhouette – it doesn't mean that all other rules are out of the window.

Referencing again that shot out of the movie the Big Combo, the position of the male and female lead, their composed stances creates a tension that is amazing given that we can't see their faces. That's cinema. That's power.
 

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