How to photograph silhouettes

Silhouettes are a really popular photography technique that is of course also possible with your iDevices. The reason for their popularity is that they make the scene look really dramatic and just capture a perfect moment and mood.

In fact a good silhouette-photo just consists of a few important things:
A simple subject (can be a person or a object), and a bright background (if possible with some great colors). Well thats it! Now all thats left is the contrast of the subject and the background, leaving the viewer of your photo with his imagination to think what is really going on here. The cool thing about silhouettes is in fact that you dont see everything and have to make up things for yourself. This makes them so much more interesting than a normal picture. You only get a small taste of what is really going on.

The Composition:

• Play with the light: Most of the time you will be using the sun as your primary light source, but also try using other small lightsources in your scene, this makes it more interesting and mysterious.
• Break the rule of thirds: Well you dont always have to, but if you make silhouette-photos you dont have to necessarily respect this rule here. Since your object or person of interest is already the most interesting subject in the whole scene, it can be easily placed in the middle of your photo.
• Focus: Try to get everything in your focus, since this is sometimes a bit hard with your iPhone when its a bit darker, but you will regret it afterwards when you see it on a big screen and your picture isnt well focused! Take your time.

Turn of your Flash:
Well sounds stupid but you should really do that before taking the picture. Often you will be confronted with just a short occasion for the perfect silhouette but your flash will totally screw it up for you if you didnt turn it off before. In fact for me the flash is only good to turn on if you want to make ugly photos of drunk people at parties in order to laugh at them later.

Shoot distinctive shapes:
The problem with more than one subject in such photos is, that they need some space between them. Otherwise you will see both subjects as one strange object that doesnt really look like anything. An example for this is my picture. The hiker and the tree are well seperated from each other, in order to get clear shapes.

The light:
The light makes or breaks your photo. It will be the key to your success if you use it right. So everything that is lost in the details of your picture, will be made up by the color of the light. Since your subject is black or really dark, the light is the only color you can get.