How To Create A Simple Silhouette

On this video, photographer Jay P. Morgan from the Slanted Lens get back to basics and looks at a very simple topic – shooting a silhouette.

The basics of shooting a silhouette is very easy – you need a background which is lit and you need a subject which isn’t. The way to achieve this is usually to do spot metering and instead of metering for your subject you meter for the background this way the background will be correctly exposed while your subject will look like a silhouette.

The silhouettes Morgan shows in this video are not 100% dark – we actually prefer the ones where the subject is a fully dark blurb with no details which you can do with the help of some post processing.

This isn’t the first time that we look at shooting a silhouette. In a previous video photographer Curtis Judd looked at “creating the perfect silhouette video” (100% dark) which is also worth watching if you are into silhouettes especially in video and in the studio.

You can find lot more lighting tutorials on our photography lighting section here on LensVid, and you can find all of Jay P. Morgan’s videos here on LensVid on the following link.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.