Day 7 – Silhouette
I’ve been wanting to do a dramatic silhouette shot for a couple of months, and tonight gave me the perfect opportunity.
The sun was setting and I exposed for the sky, not for Chloe. This gave her a slightly silhouetted look. I took the shot a step further by playing with the Levels in Photoshop to make the silhouette more intense.
After opening Photoshop (and making a copy of the image in case I messed up), I opened Image/Adjustments/Levels. I 
grabbed the left slider to manipulate the dark parts of the image and dragged it to the right until I liked the look (about 45). Then I grabbed the middle slider and dragged it to the right to darken the midtones a little bit (about 0.89). And that was it.
You can see in the original shot, there is much more detail in Chloe’s face and you can see the colors of her shirt. Darkening the darks gives the tree more drama and highlights her backlight on the left side of frame.
A profile is the perfect framing for a silhouette shot of a kid. She’s my little cameo.
Responses and Conversations
Nice.
Comment by Mike Rothermel on March 8th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
[...] For my Day 12 shot of the Photo A Day project I happened to walk by some cool tree shadows on the way to my car from my office, and I couldn’t resist stopping for some photos. It made me realize that we are much too often looking at the objects around us for photography inspiration, but forget to look at the shadows beneath and around these objects or just the lack of light that makes for some cool images. (See Stephanie’s great silhouette shot for an example of this.) [...]
Comment by Shooting the Kids - » Day 12: Don’t Forget The Shadows on March 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm