Photo1Q3.23: Silhouette Group Practice

When being first introduced to the silhouettes through the videos, I was fascinated by how much emotion you can create with shadows, because it takes away the biggest factor in portraying emotion; one's face. They communicated their message, instead, through lots of movement and formations that helped to express what exactly they wanted to express. I normally communicate thoughts and expressions in photography through candid and raw photos (which is why I enjoy street photography so much), but in a studio environment, it's probably a lot more difficult as you'd have to tell your subject the exact poses and emotions that you want.

In my group was Rylen, Eldon, Kris, Noah, and myself. Rylen and Kris helped as "stagehands", assisting the rotating photographers (me, Eldon, Noah) in directing the subjects. I took part in directing the subjects (everyone excluding me) to do what was needed. I also searched for the exact images we wanted behind the silhouettes.

The outside silhouettes were mistakes as we did not have objects and did not tell a story, so apologies for that, but here they are nonetheless.

Outdoor






Indoor

Hint: Mongolia

Hint: ______ and Robin

The last image was particularly interesting to do because Noah (who plays Batman in this scene from Jaden Smith's "Batman" music video) had to jump. Because it was so dark, I had to accommodate for the eventual noise that this image would have (which can be seen quite clearly on the projector sheet). We utilized pens, tape, my jacket, and another sheet to communicate the vintage batman message. Scene/location was decided by Noah, and I believe he wanted to also draw on inspiration from the Batman music video (which has the imagery depicted above).

As for camera control, I used a slower shutter speed (which makes slight motion blur obvious), a higher ISO (~800), and the largest aperture I could use without blurring out the sheet or subject, which I believe was f/3.5.

The most significant lesson I learned about this was that preparation is key. Sure, you can wing it like I do sometimes, but its quite unhealthy. Develop good habits, and leave maybe 25% of a creative project unprepared. You should definitely allow your creativity to change certain things about a photograph on the spot, though it helps a lot to have a scene already prepped and an idea already in your head before heading into a project like this.