What is the proper way to take a picture of a silhouette?

Question

I turned off the lights in my living room and turned on this lamp i have and it gave off a lot of light. I had my sister stand in front of the light but it was way underexposed. Did I do it wrong? What should I have done?

Answer 1

A silhouette subject usually is underexposed. That's what makes it a silhouette. You're using backlight to get basically the shape of your subject.

Try different distances of the light to subject, until you get it the way you want it. The light doesn't have to point straight at the camera, by the way.

Answer 2

Well a good silhouette photo is in fact underexposed as others have mentioned so perhaps the image was in fact overexposed. To do a good silhouette you should have a camera that has a manual mode in which you can manually select your shutter speed and aperture without having the camera make any adjustments whatsoever. So with your camera set to manual mode and with the lights turned off in the living room and the bright lamp turned on, take your camera and focus you camera on the bright part of the lamp. Your camera should in some way tell you what the aperture and shutter speed is. You are going to need to lock in the aperture and shutter speed reading that you get here. Once you figure out the lighting scenario in terms of the meter reading proceed to get your sister and have her stand in front of the lamp at varying distances and poses. Of course like the previous post also mentioned make sure that the camera's flash is turned off and in addition to this make sure there isnt light bleeding in from other rooms, try to make your living room as dark as possible. Anyhow I hope this helps you.

Answer 3

You have the right idea. You want the background light bright, and the subject in the shadow. The trick is to meter the background light. Most cameras in auto mode will meter the whole scene and if you have a point and shoot, you are in a tough spot. If your camera will do an exposure lock, point it at the light, lock the exposure and then recompose on the subject. You can also point it at the light, check the readings and then put your camera in manual mode and dial in whatever exposure setting you got from pointing at the light. Here's an example:

http://www.olphoto.net/photos/2360684-L.jpg

In this photo, I metered on the light in the fountain and the couple came out nice and dark - which was my intent.

Answer 4

this might be obvious, but if it's not make sure the flash is not on. the shutter if you can adjust it should be a low number to let more of the light in, although if it is very low make sure you hold the camera steady as blurring is more likely to occur, and if you can change the aperture the lower the number the lighter the photo will turn out...if you are using a more simple digital camera without manual settings try changing the settings to cloudy or something similar.