Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Photography: Get a nice silhouette in camera

I m going lay down a quick tip right here. I actually read this in a Swedish photo magazine and i though it would be great sharing because its fast and quick, makes alot easier in the post processing area.

Now, why i m telling you this? Well because i find myself shooting more and more photo's everyday and lets say i go for about a 4h shoot and take lets say 60 pictures, i will probably end up using lets say 10 of those shots (found that to be my average of decent picture, or shots that get taken the way i want to). That means that i will spend about 30min or so each image depending on what effect i want to give the photograph (which i usually already have in mind). So that is quite alot of time and time that i don't really have. Plus i started shooting film again :)

So i m going to start of simple, on how to get a very nice silhouette in the camera. So how do i do it?

As i have explained there are several ways of doing this (remember the article i wrote a while back on how to get good sunset shot) well this is pretty much the same.

Instead of choosing the matrix metering mode i will choose spot metering, and what i will do is that i will point my camera towards what looks to be the brightest spot in the sky (silhouettes often work best with a very nice sky) and when i have found this spot i will hold down me AE-L or AF-L bottom on my camera (this locks the metering so to speak) and then i will move the camera down and line up my shot and press the shutter. This will give you some very nice results. You could also go into the M mode (if you have time) and mess around with the shutter speeds and the apreture, but if your in a hurry the spot metering will never fail you.

If you still have the sun in your image, try not to meter of the sun, this will give you a very underexposed shot. Too underexposed thus not rendering some very good results, so meter of a relative bright area instead.


Below is an example shot that was given in the magazine, images taken by Geoff Simpson

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