How to take wonderful silhouette photos with your mobile phone
Silhouette photos have an immeasurable visual appeal. They combine drama, mystery and fun, emphasize the shape of the theme, and create a strong focus in the composition.
It looks cool. In fact, it’s easy to capture these images with your mobile phone. In this tutorial, you can see how to take wonderful silhouette photos with your mobile phone.
Define what is silhouette
Silhouettes are pictures that only capture the outline effect of people, objects or other scenes. In most cases, the main body is black and can be recognized by the outline. But this is not a fixed standard. As long as your subject appears dark in the background, you can get a silhouette. Sometimes you can also create partial silhouettes, which is the magic of silhouettes, such as clothing patterns, facial contour features, etc.
It depends on what kind of silhouette you want.
What is a good silhouette theme?
As for taking silhouettes, there are many topics to choose from, but you also need to make appropriate choices. Taking a silhouette means giving up the details of the subject. The subject is relatively simple, well-defined, easy to identify, and completely different from the external environment, with sufficient recognition.
You can consider any object in nature, trees, leaves, animals, etc. If your city has beautiful buildings, even if you use the skyline, it will have a good outline. Anything can beSilhouette photography
As long as it is creative and experimental, don’t worry or be afraid to try new things.
How to create silhouettes
Usually we think of shooting a subject with full light. However, when shooting silhouettes, backlighting is required, that is, the light needs to be behind the subject, rather than illuminating the subject from the front. At the same time, there should be no obstructions in the light source and the subject to avoid the destruction of the silhouette outline.
Prepare your lens, select the composition frame in the viewfinder, and use the brightest part of the picture as the metering point. By exposing the brightest part, other areas such as the foreground or the main body will appear relatively dark, and then the silhouette will come out. However, if you want to get a more obvious contour effect, you can reduce the exposure manually.
At the same time, you should remember that what you see with the naked eye is not what the camera captures.
Use simple background
The composition of the silhouette needs to highlight the clear outline of the subject, and the spatial stereoscopic sense is relatively weak, so it needs to reduce the image of other messy elements on the screen, so it is necessary to ensure that the shooting background is as simple as possible.
In order to achieve this goal, it is sometimes necessary to get more pure sky as the background from a low angle of view. Most of the time you need to have the lowest possible angle to get the best picture.
Outdoor shooting: using sunlight as light source
The best time to take a silhouette outdoors is at the golden moment of sunrise or sunset, when the sun is soft, which is the best light source for shooting.
Sometimes the sun can be used as the subject of photography or as a photographic prop. As an element in the picture, it will bring some amazing magical effects.
Even, you can use the sun spot to enhance the image of the subject, which is sometimes difficult to operate. But when you do, you will find it interesting. Try to use the solar flare from different angles to make it more vivid, rather than destroy the integrity of the theme.
At the same time, taking silhouettes is also an important method of street photography. You can add street interest through silhouettes outdoors.
Indoor shooting: make good use of light
When taking a silhouette indoors, if the sun is used as the light source, it can be perfectly captured in the same way. If you use other light sources, you just need to find a powerful light source, such as a lamp.
Place your subject in front of the light for shooting, which is full of drama and mystery and can arouse the imagination of the audience. At the same time, with enough practice, you can even try to photograph a person’s profile or the whole body surrounded by light.
Of course, any light source can be the inspiration for shooting, such as indoor soft lights and stage lights can be the light source to form an excellent silhouette. As long as you find it with your heart, you can find many opportunities to record the moment and create a sense of mystery with silhouettes from your daily life.
Pay attention to overlapping perspectives and multiple elements
If there are multiple subjects, the interaction between multiple elements is easy to cause contour overlap. If there are too many overlapping parts, the integrity and aesthetic feeling of the contour will be destroyed, and at the same time, the sense of heaviness will be increased, making it more difficult to see what the subject is. Therefore, when shooting, it is necessary to make every object clear and visible from an individual perspective.
