 Ashleigh M. Bunton |
f-stop and shutter speeds okay this isn't really a digital question but I didn't know what catagory to pick to put it in. For my research technique I did a silhouette and I didn't realize I toook one until after I took it and got my photos back. What is the usual shutter speed and f-stop for silhouettes or doesn't it matter?
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robert G. Fately |
Ashleigh, the issue is not what particular settings you use, it's that to make a silhouette you basically want to drastically underexpose the subject in the foreground while allowing the (much brighter) background to be properly exposed. In other words, a silhouette is just an example of excessively contrasty lighting - the reason many folks are sadly surprised with this look on shots taked at the beach is that their light meter blindly tries to make a good overall exposure and overcompensates for the extremely bright background (the beach) so the subjects in the foreground come out as shadows with no detail. So, to get a silhouette on purpose you first need to ensure that the lighting on the subject is much dimmer than the lighting in the bacground. Stand your subject in front of a large picture window, say, on a bright day. Next, use your spot meter function to get a reading for the scene through the window - maybe in tells you to shoot at 1/125th at f8 or whatever. Now, set your camera to manual (because we don't want the meter to "correct" the exposure) and set the camera to whatever it metered for the background (1/125th, f8 in my example). You light meter might indicate that this is a bad underexposure, but that's what you really want when you are trying to make a silhouette, right? Of course, you may want to bracket the exposure anyway, just in case one variant (maybe a smaller aperture, whatever) is more to your liking. Hope that helps.
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Ashleigh M. Bunton |
yes that did help a lot thanks :)
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