How to Photograph Dynamic Silhouettes

Hey. What's up guys? Professional outdoor photographer David Johnson here. And today I'm in Duck, North Carolina. It's right by the outer banks.

And what I'm doing is trying to photograph some really dynamic silhouette photographs. So, what do you try to do when you try to highlight silhouettes and photography? Well, today we're out here at sunset on this boardwalk and I'm just shooting some wildlife and just kinda getting the feel of this place. And I noticed these sea grasses over to my right. And what I found is that when you get a sunset and there's not really a lot of details in the sky like no clouds or color or anything like that, you focus your view down off the horizon a little bit and you can photograph some really good silhouettes.

It's really easy to do and we're gonna show you exactly how to do that in today's video. Now, when you're photographing silhouettes what I like to try to do is, like I said, get down below that horizon line and really seclude your subject matter that is below that surface level. That's going to create negative space and color around those subjects so that you can really seclude those and just see the silhouetted grass in this case that we're photographing today. Now, I like to use telephoto lenses while I do this. So today I'm using the Fujifilm X-T30 with a 50-140 lens attached.

And I'm basically going to be zooming in and composing this scene so that you just see a line of sea grasses going across the frame. I'm gonna be shooting this horizontally because the line of that sea grass lines up horizontally. So that's all I'm gonna be shooting with today. Not only that, but when you're shooting scenes like this, what you're able to do is shoot handheld. You don't even need to use a tripod because what you have to do, for this shot in particular, is expose to the surrounding area and the surrounding color.

Since we're doing silhouettes, your subject matter which is the sea grass in this case is just going to be completely black. So, since we're exposing to the surrounding color we're using a really fast shutter speed to capture that color and not overexpose it. We're not worried about underexposing the subject because it is gonna be that silhouetted effect. So, as you can see, silhouettes are pretty easy to photograph. They don't have to be sea grasses.

They can be something like trees. They can be outlines of people. They can be outlines of rocks. Anything really that's gonna be secluded against that really colorful sky is gonna make for a great silhouette. When you have a lot of color and beautiful detail in that sky as well.

Shoot those silhouettes. Get a little bit creative with your silhouettes too. And try to photograph something really special with a lot of just outline detail on those things. Little abstract never hurts at all.