Digital Focus: Taking Silhouettes

Feeling artsy? Want to take a photo with mood? Learn to shoot silhouettes.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Taking Silhouettes

One of the first things you learn when you get a camera is never to take pictures with the sun behind the subject, shining into the lens. That's generally pretty good advice. But then again, rules are made to be broken.

When you take a picture with the sun up front, of course, the subject gets massively underexposed--dark and with little detail--while the brightly lit background is perfectly visible. That may not make for a great portrait, but it's the textbook definition of special kind of photo: the silhouette.

Silhouettes are surprisingly easy to take, and they make bold, somber photographic statements. Grab your digital camera and give them a shot.

Set the Sun Angle

The most important element of your silhouette is the composition--specifically, where you place the sun. You'll need to position the sun somewhere in front of you. The strongest silhouettes feature the sun physically in the frame, either visible in the sky or masked behind the subject, as in my photo of the Washington Monument.

Choose Your Exposure

The whole point of getting the sun out in front of your camera is to radically underexpose the subject. The exposure, then, is key. It's important to base your digital camera's exposure on the brightly lit part of the scene, not the shadowy subject. These days, most digital cameras come with an exposure lock button; if yours does, just point the camera at a bright path of sky, press and hold the exposure lock, then recompose the photo and take the shot.

If your camera lacks an exposure lock, you have two other choices. The easiest solution is to use the camera's exposure compensation control (usually marked with the abbreviation "EV" somewhere on the camera body) and underexpose the photo by setting the camera to-2 or perhaps even-3. Or there's the more time-consuming option: Point your camera at the sky and check the camera's automatic settings. Then switch the camera to manual exposure mode and take the photo at that same shutter speed and aperture setting.

Fine-Tune Your Shot

Once you take a picture, switch to your camera's playback mode and check your shot. If the subject isn't silhouetted enough to suit your taste, you can take it again--but this time set the camera's EV exposure compensation to underexpose the photo even more. It's not a bad idea to take a shot, check the playback, and then shoot it again with a different amount of underexposure. When you get the camera home, you can keep your favorite one or two shots and discard the rest.

Dave's Favorites: Converting Video With EO-Video

I'm convinced that more people would watch video on their PCs and PDAs if it were just a little easier to manage. After all, there are a thicket of file formats out there--MPEG, AVI, MOV, DIVX, and others--and not all video players handle all of those formats.

So what do you do when you want to download a music video from the Internet and watch it on your Sony Clie? Nine times out of ten, you probably discover the file is in some video format that neither you nor your Clie has ever heard of, and you simply give up. So much for the promise of multimedia.

Well, you don't have to abandon your dreams of digital video. Instead, just download a program that can convert video from the smorgasbord of formats that are out there to the one or two common file formats that your PC's or PDA's video player understands.

My favorite tool for the job is EO-Video, available for $34.95 online. You can load a QuickTime file, for instance, and save it as an MPEG-1 video. Or grab a WMV file--created expressly for Microsoft's Windows Media Player--and save it as general purpose AVI or MPEG files that any video player can understand.

EO-Video is great because it's an easy-to-use program that levels the playing ground for video playback on any kind of computer or handheld. If you want to experiment with video but have been put off by arcane file formats, grab a trial copy of the program.

Q&A: How Do I Make an 11-by-17-Inch Print?

How can you print digital images on a paper size that is larger than 8 by 10 or letter-size?

--Leroy Williams, Millville, New Jersey

The quick answer, Leroy, is that you may need an entirely new printer. Most ink jet printers are designed to handle a maximum paper size of 8.5 by 11 inches. To print larger prints (like 11 by 17 or larger) you'll need what's commonly referred to as a wide-format printer. Common wide-format printers include the Epson Stylus Photo 1280 and the Canon i9100 Photo Printer.

I found the Epson printer for around $450 at the PCWorld.com Product Finder. The Canon printer hasn't turned up on the Product Finder yet, but you can find it on Canon's Web site.

Hot Pics

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Heat of the Moment," by Rick Young, Munster, Indiana

Rick says that he took this photo with a Canon S30 digital camera at the tip-off before a local high-school basketball game. He says that he shot the scene with an ISO of 400 with the zoom set to maximum and the exposure set to automatic.

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For April, we chose Samara Brenda Winfield's photo of a homeless man.

Congratulations to Samara and to everyone that won the Hot Pic of the Week this month. Keep those entries coming!

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

For back issues, visit our Digital Photo Tips archive. Sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.