for self portrait silhouette photography, you will find the following tools incredibly helpful: remote/intervalometer, tripod.don’t forget to pay careful attention to scene setting and composition, as with all photos, once you get the technique down.no one formula for camera settings is perfect – the strength of your light will dictate what you’ll need, so experiment.identify or set up a significant source of back lighting.try to reduce excessive clutter or multiple other confusing shapes in the image unless they add to the “story” you want it to tell.create distinct, clean shapes with your silhouette subject(s).Voila! This is the basic formula for silhouette photography. This way, your subject will be very dark, creating an outline with little detail from the front. He wears a tuxedo typical of the 1920s fashion and holds a cigarette in his left hand at stomach level, while he puts his right. The self-portrait shows Max Beckmann posing in a frontal way. It now hangs in the Busch-Reisinger Museum of the Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is an especially rich medium to take up during the pandemic when you may not be able to travel freely in search of new connections and/or projects outside of the home. Once you’ve identified a subject and have a way to backlight them, expose the image for the light behind, rather than the subject (or anything in the foreground). Self-Portrait in Tuxedo is an oil on canvas painting by Max Beckmann from 1927. Self-portraiture offers an inexhaustible source of creative expression. Play around with it to see what you can achieve. There are many ways to obtain this kind of setting, from studio lighting to sunlight – I find that sunsets provide an amazing backdrop for silhouettes. The most important thing to remember is that your subject (the thing you want forming the silhouette, in the case of self portraiture, you) should not be lit from the front (we want to obscure most of the detail) and there should be a significant light source in the background (this is what creates an outline, or silhouette). Sunsets and sunrises make an absolutely excellent, beautiful light source for silhouettes! It’s fairly simple to get the basics down, and from there, you can let your creativity run wild.
If you’ve never shot silhouettes, you may be wondering how to achieve this look. This is true of silhouette photography – a genre that can be alarmingly beautiful and expressive. Sometimes you can say just as much with the suggestion of a thing as you can with all of the detail.