How to Photograph Silhouettes in 8 Easy Steps

I normally talk about the importance of using a flash when taking shots into the sun to give sufficient light to add features to your subject but there are also times when making your subject featureless apart from their outline against a bright background can be most effective – or when in other words silhouette is a worth exploring.
Silhouettes are a wonderful way to convey drama, mystery, emotion and mood to the viewers of your photos and often stand out in an album because of the combination of their simplicity but also the story that they convey. I love them because they don’t give the viewer of a clear picture of everything but leave part of the image up to their imagination to wonder about.
The basic strategy you’ll need to employ in taking silhouette shots is to place your subject (the shape you want to be blacked out) in front of some source of light and to force your camera to set its exposure based upon the brightest part of your picture (the background) and not the subject of your image.
In doing this your subject will be under exposed (and very dark, if not black).
There are a lot of very technical descriptions going around on how to take great silhouette shots that you might want to look up but let me attempt to run through some basic steps that should get you the results you’re after. In essence what we’re trying to do is make your camera think that it’s the bright parts of the picture you are most interested in.
Here’s how to do it:

1. Choose a Strong Subject

Almost any object can be made into a silhouette, however some are better than others. Choose something with a strong and recognizable shape that will be interesting enough in its two dimensional form to hold the interest of those viewing your image. Silhouettes can’t draw on the colors, textures and tones of subjects to make them appealing – so the shape needs to be distinct.

2. Turn off your Flash

If you have your camera in automatic mode your camera will probably want to use its flash which will ruin the silhouette. Basically you want as little light on the front of your subject as possible – so the flash has to go (basic – but I’ve seen a few attempted silhouette shots with the flash firing).

3. Get Your Light Right

When it comes to lighting your subject you’ll need to throw out a lot of what you’ve learnt about normal photography and think a little backwards. Instead of lighting the front of your subject, in silhouettes you need to ensure that there is more light shining from the background than the foreground of your shot – or to put it another way – you want to light the back of your subject rather than the front. The perfect light for this is placing your subject in front of a sunset or sunrise – but really any bright light will be able to do the trick.

4. Frame your image

Frame your shot so you are shooting with your subject in front of a nice plain, but bright background. Usually the best backgrounds will be a bright cloudless sky with the sun setting. You want to position the brightest light source behind your subject (either so that they hide it or so that its in the background somewhere).

5. Make silhouetted shapes distinct and uncluttered

If there is more than one shape or object in the image that you’re attempting to silhouette, try to keep them separated. ie if you are silhouetting a tree and a person don’t have the person stand in front of the tree or even leaning on it as it will merge them into one shape and as a result your viewers could be confused about what the shape is.
Also when framing you’ll probably want to photograph silhouetted people as profiles rather than looking straight on. This means that more of their features (nose, mouth, eyes) are outlined and they are more likely to be recognized.

6. In Auto Mode

Most modern digital cameras have automatic metering which are pretty good at sensing how to expose a photograph so that everything is well lit. The problem with this is that most cameras are so smart that they will light up your subject instead of underexposing it to get a silhouette so you need to trick it. Most cameras work out the exposure levels in auto mode when you push your shutter half way down (at the same time that they focus). So point your camera at the brightest part of your picture and then press the shutter halfway down (don’t let go). Then move your camera back to frame your shot with the subject where you want it and then finish taking the shot. With most digital cameras this will result in a silhouetted subject. In effect what you’re doing is tricking your camera into thinking that the bright part of the image is the mid tone of it so that anything darker than it will be exposed as a nice dark shadow.
Some digital cameras also have ‘spot’ or ‘centered’ metering modes that you can switch on which helps with the above technique as they will set the metering on the central spot of your frame rather than multiple spots. This means you can accurately tell your camera exactly which bit of the bright background you want it to set the exposure on.

7. Manual Mode

If this technique doesn’t work and your camera has controls to allow manual exposure or exposure compensation you might like to try some of your own settings. The beauty of digital is that you can experiment to your hearts content until you get the result you’re after.
A simple way to start using manual mode is to look at the shutter speed and aperture that it suggests in automatic mode and to start from there. If in auto mode your subject is too light (ie you need to make it darker) stop down the shutter speed a stop or two and see what impact that has. Use the ‘bracketing’ technique that I described in my previous tip on sunrises and sunsets to get a variety of shots at slightly different exposures.

8. Focusing

In most cases you’ll want the subject which is silhouetted to be the thing that is in focus most crisply. This can mean that the process described in point 4 can be a little tricky as pushing your shutter half way down to get the metering right also means that you’ll focus on that spot in the background. To get around this you can use two strategies. Firstly if your camera has manual focusing you might want to try that. Pre focus your shot before you meter your shot.
The other strategy is to use Aperture to maximize your depth of field (the amount of your image that is in focus). Set a small aperture (ie a larger number) to increase the depth of field – this means you’re more likely to have a sharper foreground and background in your shots.
One last tip on Silhouettes – while a total silhouette with a nice crisp and black subject can be a powerful shot, also consider the partial silhouette where some detail of your subject is left. Sometimes a touch of light on them makes them slightly more three dimensional and ‘real’. This is the beauty of bracketing your shots as it will leave you with total and partial silhouettes to choose form.

How to Photograph Mushrooms, Toadstools and Fungi

One of my favorite things to photograph is Mushrooms – in this post I’ll give you some tips on how to do it.
As a child I had a love hate relationship with Mushrooms.
It all started down on my Nana’s farm where on cool Autumn days one of the things we’d love to do was go Mushrooming. We’d hunt in dark damp places for them and would marvel at the different colors, sizes and shapes that they came in – these bizarre little things that looked like something from out of space.
Nana taught us which ones were edible and which ones to leave alone and we’d return to her kitchen with a bucketful which we’d clean, chop up and put in a pot. That’s where the ‘hate’ part of my relationships started. I can still remember the smell of that stewing pot and Nana’s attempts at getting me to eat the fruit of our mushroom hunt. No thanks – not for me.
These days I don’t mind eating them as much as I used to – however my love of the ‘hunt’ for good mushrooms, toadstools and fungi is still with me – however I don’t hunt them to eat, I hunt them to photograph.
The little alien like creatures that we used to pick and chop up are now sought after photographic subjects. The variety of shapes, colors and sizes present photographers with all kinds of striking possibilities.

How to Photograph Mushrooms, Toadstools and Fungi:

It’s all about the Season – Fungi photography is not a year round hobby as they only tend to grow at certain times of years. I suspect that this will vary from place to place and between varieties but I find I have the best luck in Winter and Autumn where it’s cooler, darker and damper.

Where to Find them

At Nana’s farm we learned where Mushrooms hide and discovered that it’s pretty much the opposite sorts of places that you’ll find flowers (who like warmth, light and are generally out in the open). Mushrooms like the dark, they like the wet and they tend to appear in places that you’d least like to be (on the farm it was often next to a cow pat). Keep your eyes open below trees, under leaves and amongst undergrowth of forests.

Groom Your Fungi before Shooting

Mushrooms grow up from under the ground and as a result can often be half covered in dirt, bits of vegetation and other ‘gunk’. While you might like this natural look it can also be well worth your while clean them up a little before photographing them. Brush off dirt and vegetation and remove any movable distracting objects in the foreground or background of your shots. Remember to be an environmentally friendly photographer and to leave things as naturally as you found them but don’t be afraid to do a little grooming pre-shooting.

Get down Low

Perhaps the most effective way of entering the world of Mushrooms and Toadstools and drawing the viewer of your image into your shot is to get down low and shoot from ground level. This will enable you to see the textures, shapes and colors of not only the top dome of the mushroom but it’s underbelly. It will also give your mushroom height which makes for a more dramatic and three dimensional shot. Of course means you’ll probably spend a lot of your Fungi photography flat on your stomach on the ground getting dirty. No one said this would be easy!

Get in Close

For a real impact in your mushroom shots get in as close to them as possible and try some tight framing. This will mean you might want to think about switching your camera into macro mode or, if you have a DSLR, hook yourself up with a macro lens or macro screw in lens and learn how to use it.

Lighting

One of the challenges you’ll be faced with when shooting from low down in lower lighting situations is that the underbelly of your mushroom (which is often it’s most interesting part due to the patterns and textures there) will often be in darkness when compared with it’s top. Lighting a mushroom’s belly can be a tricky thing. Here are a few techniques to try:

• Fill Flash - the first thing to try that almost any digital camera can do these days is to use a flash to achieve a ‘fill flash‘ effect. If you can control the level of output from the flash you’ll want to experiment with this as there is a danger of getting quite harshly lit parts of the mushroom.
• Directional/off Camera Flash - the problem with built in flash units is that you can’t really direct what direction it fires in and when photographing a small object like a mushroom this means that you might not just light up the underbelly but also the top of the mushroom as well as it’s surrounds. If you’re lucky enough to have an external flash unit experiment with bouncing it off other objects (trees, the ground or purpose built reflectors). If you can take your flash off your camera and move it around the mushroom you can also get some interesting sidelight or backlighting results also. Off camera flash is probably the best bet if you have the kit to do it.
• Reflectors – last time I went mushroom hunting I took a reflector with me and used it to reflect available light from the sun back up into the underbelly of the mushrooms. I found this worked quite well (although as I was alone at times I found it a bit of a juggling act).

Stabilize Your Camera

Due to the low light in most places that you’ll find Mushrooms, you’ll often need to shoot with longer shutter speeds which mean the need to find a way to keep your camera perfectly still. Some tripods will allow you to set up your camera as low as inches from the ground by spreading their legs widely but another option is one of the numerous

Slow Shutter Speeds

If you’re struggling with the low light levels don’t be afraid to lengthen the shutter speeds that you’re using. The beauty of Fungi is that they are very still and if you’ve got your camera stabilization working for you with a solid tripod and shutter release cable you can lengthen the shutter speeds almost as long as you’d like (within reason).

Use a Shallow Depth of Field to Isolate Your Fungi

Mushrooms and Fungi usually grow in environments where there can be a lot of clutter around them in the vegetation that they grow in. One great way to isolate them from this background and foreground distraction is to use a shallow depth of field by selecting a large Aperture which will throw the background out of focus (see this tutorial on other tips for getting great backgrounds). Of course it can also be effective to show the context of the mushroom if you’re lucky enough for it to be growing in a photographic location – in these cases you’ll want to select a smaller aperture.