silhouette advice

Kagan

I am wanting to learn to do silhouettes. I have taken shots and experimented but not sure how to set the camera to do this properly. I get shots of my boys from behind, but not already blacked out-If I goto photoshop to darken them-I darken everything. I took several tonight alternating between auto and manual and differing apps and shutter speeds. I would post them but they werent worth keeping and it takes dial up forever to load to smugmug. Any general advice would be greatly appreciated!

colourbox

Modern cameras are programmed for consumers who want to see the face of the subject and not have it silhouetted to black, so they naturally try to sense and compensate for backlit situations. if you want a silhouette you have to know how to force your way past your camera's "idiot proof" programming.

I don't want this to sound like a stupid question from me but do you already know how to override the auto metering on your camera or how to set it manually?

For instance, when I want to do a silhouette of a friend in front of a sunset, I take these steps:

1. Point the viewfinder's metering area at the area that should be exposed normally, which in this example is the sunset background, and press my camera's Exposure Lock button.
2. Keeping Exposure Lock on, I point the viewfinder's metering area at my friend, and press the shutter halfway until focus on subject is achieved.
3. With exposure locked on the background and focus locked on the subject, I press the shutter the rest of the way.

Sometimes, it's a pain to manage exposure and focus lock at the same time. In that case I'll switch my camera over to manual mode and meter off of the background to set the exposure, using the exposure indicator in the viewfinder to tell me if I'm over or under, and if I'm doing this on my point-and-shoot I'll double-check the LCD preview before shooting. With proper silhouette exposure locked down via the manual mode, I can just focus and shoot.

Another thing a camera might do in auto mode is turn on the flash, if it thinks you might be pointing at a backlit subject. You may have to shut it off manually, and that may again require making sure your camera is in an expert mode and not any of the Auto modes. And make sure you have no "backlight compensation" features or modes turned on.

If your camera actually comes with a silhouette mode, you can try that...