Experiment With Silhouette

RyanS

I've been experimenting with silhouette work. I've learned it is much harder to do than I imagined. What do you think?

DaddyO

Pretty nice effort. Really like the colors your using to spice things. Think your model gave you some nice ones to work with and was having a great time doing so

lifeinfocus

Very cool! Could give a little info. how that is done?

Phil

Macushla

They are great - I'd love to know how you did them also.

Richard

Looks like you're getting the technique right. I like #2 and #3 best as they convey a sense of motion. The static ones don't move me .

Azzaro

I really like them......

RyanS

Thank you for the replies everyone. I appreciate the feedback. I like the "motion" ones as well. The orange one is my favorite. Here is a quick run-down of what I did:

• The most important element for the lighting was the power of the light on the backdrop. The background was metering f/11-f/16 and I was shooting at f/8. I adjusted several times. Even lighting was quite important to ensure good results.
• If the light was too powerful, then I'd get too much spillback on the subject. Too low, and I ended up with hot-spots on the bacgkround (which would have made PP a pain). I wanted just a tinge of spill on to the subject to help with a bit of modeling and dimensionality. I think this separates it from being a photograph rather than just a drawing. The "sweet spot" was about 12 inches wide, the subject had a hard time staying in the box.
• One thing I learned was how hard it was to get a sense of "person" with a black blob. By far this was the most challenging. It was an experimental process. I threw a lot away. The trick, I think, is to have at least a couple of elements that are recognizable while also maintaining some amount of "separation" between body parts. For example, the yellow one would have been much stronger had I asked the subject to put her left arm down. Thinking in silhouette was quite challenging. I've worked so hard to develop a "3D" vision that switching to "2D" was a tripping point.
• For PP work, it was quite simple. Smashed all the sliders to create the highest contrast images Lr would give me. Because I did the lighting right, this gave me nice strong blacks against pure white. Then in PS did a simple color layer set to multiply (this worked great because I had a pure white background, and a mostly black subject).

torags

I too like the sense of motion & the hair accents that. I think you're on the right track for something impressive.

You might like to get the entire body in to further develop the twisting motion

edit: Hey Ryan why don't you see if you get get some images of the original ipod marketing. They did a lot of good stuff with silhouettes (& Michael Jackson album covers)

Good luck

Juano

I agree with the motion giving these pics something different. #2 for me is the best.

concord977

This series reminds me a lot of the Apple iPod commercials from a few years ago ( http://bit.ly/KzFz3M ). I liked it then, and I like this now!