The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

SILHOUETTE

Silhouettes predate photography by a century, and began as black card cut-out portraits in profile (the cheapest way of making a portrait at the time). By their nature, they create two separate planes in a picture—subject and background—and rely entirely on this and on outline for their effect and success. Advanced digital processing makes it possible to open up shadows and recover detail which, while valuable for some images, has also created a kind of obsession among some photographers for revealing everything in an image. Well, sometimes you need to hold things back from the viewer in order to make the photograph more interesting, and a silhouette is one clear case of not wanting to see detail in the shadows. Underexposure is what ...