Create Silhouettes Using Natural Light

A quick guide in creating silhouette photography. Try it out today.

Sep 09, 2024

You Don’t Need Fancy Gear

All silhouette photography really is about is creating a strong contrast between lights and darks, where the main subject is in the dark.

Here’s an example:

You probably get the impression that you need something “special” in order to create this effect.

Truth is, you don’t even need artificial lights or a fancy camera.

You can do this with your phone.

All you need is 1 simple ingredient…

A Strong Light Source

Street lights at night.
Traffic lights.
Sunlight.
Window light.

Anything.

The rest is placement and camera settings.

Here’s how you do it.

Placement & Settings

Place your subject, in this case a person, directly in front of the strong light source.

Meaning, the light source should shine behind your person.

After that’s done, point the camera at the subject at frame the picture to your liking.

Next, use your camera settings to slowly bring down exposure so that your background isn’t too overexposed.

This is about fine-tuning so that the background looks good all while your subject is darkened as much as possible - to start working on that silhouette.

What you will notice is that your subject is very dark (which is good, of course), but it might not be entirely black like in the picture example above.

This is because you need one final step to finalize the image.