Simple steps to take a silhouette photo (2)

Silhouette shooting in uncontrollable environment may have more unpredictability, and the external light conditions change rapidly. The shooting effect is closely related to the degree of adjustment. In fact, it is difficult to shoot effectively with sunlight for most of the day. This also explains why you will see that 90% or even more outdoor silhouettes are taken around sunrise or sunset. From a natural point of view, the sun at these times is at the lowest point of the sky trajectory, and it is most disturbed by the atmosphere at this height, and the sun will be covered by clouds, thus producing very ideal and usually richer background light.

But as mentioned above, unlike shooting in a studio environment, the change of the position of the sun on the horizon will soon affect the actual lighting conditions, and the pressure will be greater when shooting naturally. Do you really want to shoot in full manual mode? Do two things at the same time? , always pay attention to the change of light, constantly adjust. Therefore, you must know the ideal setting of the camera like the back of your hand. Only in this way can you make corresponding incremental changes without wasting time because your eyes leave the viewfinder. But unfortunately, perfect lighting conditions, such as the blink of an eye, are usually difficult to seize such a good shooting opportunity.

If the sun is used as the background light when shooting, then many variables need to be considered in the work: clouds, buildings, the height of the subject relative to the camera, the position of the sun relative to the subject and so on. Test each variable separately to find out which variables can bring the effect and tone you are looking for in your work. The above is a beautiful silhouette photo. The photographer deliberately used the lens glare as the center of the whole image and placed the subject on the far right of the three subjects.

Camera settings

To fiddle with the camera settings in your hand and take a beautiful silhouette, you need to master some knowledge. In order to make people feel intuitively, we will use Flickr? More attributes? Function to see how some actual photos were taken. It's good for us to see the actual operation of other photographers. Can stones from other mountains attack jade? , mastered? Master? You can take similar photos yourself? And so on? Therefore, it should become a habit to use such attribute functions frequently!

Silhouette photographer

The above picture shows us that under appropriate circumstances, complex backgrounds can sometimes render excellent performances. Just from the image, we can't immediately know clearly and accurately what the light source behind us is. It may be a window, or it may be stained glass outside a bright room.

As you can see in the picture, the exposure time, aperture and ISO of the photo are set to 1/200s, f/2.2 and 1600 respectively. These three indicators are difficult problems when taking pictures, and their suitability will determine the success or failure of the final image. The shutter speed of 1/200s is quite fast in a darkroom. If you want to capture as many details as possible, you may want to lower the shutter speed to close to1100s or even lower (in the case of taking pictures with a hand-held camera, it will be more difficult to get a clear image when shooting), but all you have to do is ignore the details, so it is enough to use a faster shutter speed when shooting. One advantage of setting a faster shutter speed is that you can capture the outline of a moving object without worrying about blurring the image.

Although the final imaging result is dim, in fact, the aperture of f/2.2 will let a lot of light into the lens. Remember, when we talk about aperture, the bigger the number, the less visible light enters the lens and the darker the image. But seriously, many shots don't even reach the level of 2.2 at all? It can be clearly seen from the attribute information in the picture that the photographer uses Canon 5D, which is a very good SLR camera, which also reflects that it is very important to shoot good works and equipment investment. So, if the image you shot is not as dreamy as the above picture, don't feel sorry for yourself, it's not a good habit to make much ado about nothing! Whether shooting silhouettes or other shots, the lens that allows you to shoot such a low-light lens is very suitable for low-light (low-brightness) scenes. However, it should be noted that as the aperture decreases, the depth of field will also become shallow. The shallower the depth of field becomes, the more difficult it is to take a clear silhouette, because the depth of the scene means that only a few images are in focus.

Finally, the ISO setting in the ISO picture is 1600. Remember, ISO is directly proportional to the brightness of the image. The higher the ISO, the brighter the image, but the disadvantage of high ISO is that it will increase the color noise in the image. Here, I have to mention the Canon 5D used by photographers. Compared with Canon Rebel(EOS XXD/XXXD), a relatively cheap digital SLR camera, under the high sensitivity of ISO 1600, the former will have fewer color noise problems. When the amount of ambient light in the scene is relatively insufficient, the photographer may be forced to raise the ISO to 1600. When shooting silhouettes outdoors, there is usually a lot of natural light, so in sunny conditions, ISO can be set to be close to 100-200.

Louis and the balloon

Although the above picture looks very different from the last one, in theory, they are very similar. Once again, we saw a lonely figure, shooting with a very high focal length in front of a color light source. Coincidentally, these two works are both by the same photographer. This exposure time is shorter, only 1/250s, so less light enters the lens than last time. In addition, the aperture is also reduced to f /3.2 (according to most standards, this aperture setting is still too large), which will also lead to less light input. In this shooting, several distant balloons are relatively blurred due to the shallow depth of field, which enhances the aesthetic feeling of shooting, thus bringing excellent performance to the whole picture.

In the end, the photographer remained faithful to the last shot and insisted on using the high sensitivity of ISO 1600. You can look at the colored noise that finally appeared on some balloons. Once again, using high ISO is not desirable, but it is usually the only solution when shooting in dark scenes. More examples