Creative Fun With Photography: Playing Around with Silhouettes!

Quite often, I have as much fun with photography after the fact as I do with simply chasing down some subject matter I want to get some good shots of.

I am not sure exactly why, but silhouettes have fascinated me since I was a small kid with an old Kodak Instamatic camera. Anyone remember those? If you do, that makes you old!

Meh, just kidding!

Anyway, I think the appeal was always that you can tell what you are looking at, even though you can't entirely see what you're looking at.

This orb spider — outside on our back deck — ends up looking like it is "just floating there," when shot against the clear blue sky. The web almost completely vanishes... can't really make out any details (aside from hairy legs!), but no doubt about what we are looking at!

Although not entirely a silhouette, this large waterfront crane sticking up through the fog across the bay became a lot more interesting in black and white... looks a bit like some kind of strange monster!

This shot of a great blue heron worked almost in reverse:

When I was just looking at it — from about 300 feet away, mind you — it was truly a silhouette with absolutely no detail... but once I got the shot up on the screen, I was surprised to see some detail on the bird!

And the color shot actually showed even more!

Last, but not least, the prosaic "bird on a wire," in the form of a crow on the utility lines across from us. The funny thing about shooting crows is that they "look dark" even on bright sunny days... the depth of their blackness just eats all light.

Thanks for checking in and reading!

2019.09.26
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