A different perspective

Over the past few days I've set myself the challenge of trying to interesting silhouettes. I got the idea when I was out in the evening with my camera and I saw this:

Not the most amazing image I've ever taken, but I realised I really liked the shapes of the rooftops, trees and the lamp post against the orange-blue sky. So I decided to mess about and try to get some more.

See if you can find Wembley Stadium :P

One of the great things about shooting silhouettes is that you can hide things you don't like. For example, this lamp post:

 Poof! Gone. All I had to do was raise the camera a bit. (Well, almost...I'm just not tall enough to hide it completely)

I absolutely love this style of streetlight. Could've done with stopping down my aperture here to get a little more definition on the trees.

 Here I really should have focused on the branches right at the back, since that's the where your eye is drawn to. If only I had a Lytro* :p.

Apart from which silhouettes you want looking sharp, another thing to keep in mind is that changing your position a little can vastly change your image (this is in fact true when shooting anything really, but it's particularly pertinent here, when all you have to go by are shapes)

 I took these pretty close to one another - after the first one I just moved off to camera-right a bit to avoid the trees.

This was towards the end of the walk, so I'd lost the orange in the sky, but this tree was too cool to miss out.

So that was the end of the walk. The following couple are from a few days later, taken on the south bank:

They have a distinctly different look and feel to them. It's surprising how much variation in style you can get when just shooting shapes.
This last one was taken in the light exhibition in the Hayward gallery, London. The light is coming from a projector through fog which had been pumped into the room. The result was a visible cone of light which people could have fun playing with. I like the mysterious look the small amount of illumination on the face gives.

Shooting silhouettes is actually surprisingly fun. Next time it seems like there's nothing interesting around to shoot, try just looking for shapes.  Here's a few things I've learned which might help if you decide to try this for yourself:

1. Stop your aperture down. More depth of field tends to look better (unfortunately I clocked this after shooting all of mine wide open...) Consequently if you're shooting in the evening you may want to bring a tripod.
2. Your background is just as important as having an interesting shape. Try for interesting colours and textures. It must also be significantly brighter than your foreground/dark area. (See the picture of the tree that didn't quite work for why this is - you don't get anywhere near enough separation otherwise)
3. If you want to use Av, put the camera into spot metering and lock your exposure on your background. Then lock your focus and take the shot.  Some negative exposure comp. might be required to get the desired effect.
4. You'll most likely have to use manual focus - my 550D was doing a lot of focus hunting when I was shooting. Luckily for you silhouettes are dead easy to focus :)
5. Post-processing is your friend. I found my shots looked a lot more silhouette-y on my camera's LCD than when I got them onto my laptop for editing. Pulling the black levels down a little will fix this in most cases. (You'll have to be shooting RAW if you want to use something like Lightroom for post.)

Go give it a try! It'll make you look for shots in a different way, which is refreshing.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

-Benji

*/ a brain...Seriously, who actually wants to focus after taking a picture?