Shooting Silhouettes in the Midday Sun - Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

in this video , I show you how to shoot silhouettes on location in the middle of the day .

Hello , I'm Gavin Hoe and you're watching Adirama TV brought to you by adirama , the camera store that's got everything for us photographers .

And today we're going to do a shoot on location , and it's a little bit different .

It's going to be a silhouette shoot now for silhouettes , the key word is contrast , and the easiest way to get lots of contrast on location is to shoot at either end of the day so early in the morning .

If you're a morning person , I'm not .

Or at the end of the day , with a lovely sunset .

However , it's not always possible to do that , and today is one of those days is , in fact , early afternoon .

The sun is right overhead .

It's not ideal for shooting silhouettes , but we're going to do it anyway .

So let's get a model in Let's get shooting .

So my location today is the Gatwick Aviation Museum , which is a wonderful place for photography .

But even more wonderfully we've got Kerry who's going to be the model for this ?

So first thing to do is to find some shade .

So you want your subject , your model to be in the deepest shade you can and have a nice background now .

Ideally , that would mean shooting into the sun .

But the sun is right overhead , so that's not really a possibility .

So I've got Kerry and I've got a standing pretty much on the edge of this line of shade , and then I'm going to shoot over in that direction , and that's going to be my background .

OK , let's take a shot like this and see what the camera does .

So let's talk about the camera settings .

Now I'm going to shoot in aperture priority mode , and I'm just going to let the camera do its own thing .

So F 5.6 IO 200 we get a shot that looks like this .

The camera's tried to average out the shade and the bright parts of the image , and it's done a good job at averaging it .

But that's not a silhouette .

Now , to start to take control of the camera settings , I'm going to use the exposure compensation the little plus minus button , and I'm going to change it to minus one exposure , compensation now when I take this shot .

This time Kerry is a little bit darker , but so is the sky .

Basically , everything is a little bit darker .

I don't mind the sky being too dark , because I think it was too bright before .

So with that in mind , what if I use minus two ?

Minus two will be even darker Still again , The sky is darker , but now Kerry is that much darker as well .

And now we're starting to get into the territory of a good silhouette .

Now there's a couple of things that we can do as photographers with the camera to make a better silhouette .

There's also things you can do with your subject to improve your silhouettes .

The first one is what they're wearing .

So Kerry has dark clothes on , basically , and the darker the clothes , the darker they're going to look in the picture , the more it's going to look like a silhouette that kind of makes sense .

The other thing is props .

If you're going to use some props in your pictures , they need to be graphic shapes that are easily identified as a silhouette .

And with that in mind , I've got something for you .

Hold on .

Here we go .

That's for you .

So I borrowed this from the museum .

It's one of their bicycles , and it has a fantastically graphic shape .

Bicycles .

We can spot a silhouette of a bicycle and know what it is .

So let's take some shots like that .

So we're going to do exactly the same as before .

Let's start with the zero setting .

I know that's going to be too bright , but we might as well take it anyway , just to be sure .

And then I'm going to go down to minus one and then minus two on my exposure compensation .

So those are going to give me a nice choice of images , and you could stop there .

But there's one extra thing that's going to elevate this shoot to the next level .

It's one of my favourite things to include in photography .

It's a bit of smoke , so we've got Sam putting some smoke in behind , carried and , uh , this works really nicely again .

I'm gonna use my exposure compensation to try and bag a few shots .

Smoke works really well , but it works even better if you can back light it now .

Back lighting might be the sun coming in from behind .

But then , of course , we're back to the beginning or end of the day shots .

I don't have that luxury , so I'm going to go get a flash and light it with Flash .

So I've got my flash .

I'm going to point it at the back of Kerry facing where I'm shooting from and just a little way behind something like that .

Let's turn it on and let's take some shots like this .

So I've got to trigger the flash somehow .

And to do it , I'm using the flash point zoom mini OO for Olympus , which is the camera I'm using here .

And the reason I'm using this trigger is it will allow me to do high speed sync .

So I've switched from aperture priority to manual mode , and I've dialled in settings that are giving me two stops under exposure for the ambient light .

Now that's around about 4/1000 of a second at F four .

It looks like this without smoke , but of course it's the smoke that makes all the difference .

So let's add some smoke into the scene and we'll take some more pictures .

The key here is to keep taking pictures because you don't know which one of these smoke shots is gonna be the best .

And we're gonna Photoshop them together at the end , so keep snapping away .

As long as your model doesn't move , you should get a good series of pictures that can be Photoshopped together really easily .

And we're gonna do that right now .

This is one of those techniques where you really could stop at almost any point along the road and still get a great picture in its own right .

And in this case , well , I'm gonna combine the smoke together , but of course , you don't have to do that , but have a look at my pictures and perhaps you'll see why .

So these are the smoky pictures I've chosen , and they were all taken from the same few minute or so of time .

So there's no real change other than the smokers in a different position .

I had Sam wave the smoke machine up and down to get that effect .

Now I need to get these five images and join them together in one single one , each one being its own layer .

And the quickest and easiest way of doing that is to go to file and then come down to scripts and on scripts .

You'll find something called Load files into Stack .

Now here it's a matter of adding in the open files , and if you weren't using a tripod , you could try to automatically align them .

But I was .

So I'll just click the OK button and that will take the five images and make one new image with five layers .

Now I can see that each of these layers has a different type of smoke , and I want to combine this smoke where we have lots on the left with this one where it's all behind Kerry .

Now I'm gonna do that using layer masks , which I will find under layer and then down to layer , mask and reveal all .

Now that's one way of doing it .

The other way is going down to the small layer mask icon on the layers panel , which is how I'll be doing it from now on .

Now , a layer mask is this white rectangle right here .

And the way it works is you paint with the opposite colour to cut through the layer .

So I've got the paint brush .

I'm gonna come down and make sure my foreground colour is black .

If yours isn't just press D , followed by X .

And then I can just paint over this area where there's that smoke that I need to add in .

And we can just add that into the shot .

There you go .

Fantastic .

OK , that's one layer down .

And I think it was a bit there , actually .

Yes , there is .

We'll add that to I'm gonna add in some more smoke by first of all , merging these layers together .

So let's go to layer .

And then towards the bottom , you'll find one called Merge Down , not the other two .

It's merge down that you want , and that will combine the top layer , the active layer with the one directly below .

So now I'm down to four layers , and if I flip this off for a second , I can see that the next layer adds smoke over here on the right .

So let's do exactly the same thing .

I'll add a layer mask and I'll just paint over that area , and that's just gonna add that little layer of smoke in as well .

OK , let's merge those down by going to layer and then down to merge down and repeat the process .

Let's flip it off for a second .

OK , this adds quite a bit of smoke over here where I'm missing it .

That's lovely .

I'll add in a layer mask and I'll just paint that in now .

The joys of layer masks is if you go wrong , you can always go back again by changing from black as your foreground colour to white .

Either little button or press the X key to flip them around .

And you can repair things really quickly .

OK , so layer merge down .

We're nearly there .

We've got one more to go that adds some smoke at the bottom on the right .

Let's add that in like so There you go Pretty good .

I'm happy with that .

Now I could stop here again .

That was my plan when I took these pictures .

This is where I was going to stop .

But the beautiful thing about photography and postprocessing is well , sometimes you get ideas that you hadn't thought of at the time of taking the pictures like this , for example .

So let's make sure this is fully merged down by going to layer and then merge down again .

And this time I'm gonna add in some mist and I'm gonna add my own mist by going to philtre camera raw philtre .

So you need to be in Photoshop , CC or Lightroom CC .

What's up guys in this video ?

I'm going to break down exactly how to take and choose better pictures for your online dating profile .

I know it's an area where a lot of men struggle .

So I want to make a very clear and concise video on this topic .

And we're going to do this by taking a look at several examples of guys who had shitty profiles .

I'm explain exactly why their pictures weren't working .

Then I'm going to show you what they did to improve their profile and then break down why those pictures worked and why the previous ones didn't .

So you guys can replicate their success , right ?

So let's take a look at our first example .

This is a guy who was convinced that online dating just didn't work for him .

He tried different apps , different profiles , set up different bios , nothing worked .

He was getting maybe one match a month and he was super frustrated .

So let's take a look at his pictures and try to figure out why .

And as I pull up this first picture , you can probably see exactly what's going on .

This picture is atrocious , vast majority of chicks who saw his profile were not making it past the first photo .

So this is bad for two reasons .