This is my photography newsletter with fresh weekly photo stories of Edinburgh and beyond that you can get direct by email if you subscribe - free if you choose or pay a wee bit for extras
Someone emailed to suggest I add a wee tips payment option - for those of you who don’t want to subscribe but would like to offer something as a “Cheers mate, enjoyed that” option. So here it is.
Before I dive into Black Art I’d first like to thank you all - the first 100 subscribers to this substack thing - welcome everyone. Extra thanks to those of you who chose to opt for a paid subscription with even a couple of “founder” subscriptions thrown in. Looks like we’ll need to organise a night at the pub!
If you know of anyone who might wanna join us on the journey please do share a link with them. We’ll talk to anyone.
……………………………………………………………………………….
There is something about a silhouette…and I’m sure it’s not just me…that creates powerful compelling images. It could be the graphic simplicity, the arrangement of shapes and colour, but I think there’s more going on that tickles the creative bits of our brains.
The image above of a beautiful face at sunset has such a striking sharp line between the brightest and the darkest areas that it resembles one of those tricksy social media things where you’re supposed to “see” different things depending on your personality; “if you see a beautiful lady you were breast fed, but if you see an upside down urn pouring honey you will lose all your money to gambling and debauchery.”
This was my patient wife on the balcony of our hotel room watching a Tunisian sunset a few years back. I didn’t plan for the shot but when I went back in the room to swap lenses I saw a far better shot with her in it than the boring one I’d been taking of the sun sinking into the sea, so she had to endure staying still for several different attempts. My favourite bit of the image is the tiny wee bit of light on her cheekbone below her eye. Do we look deeper into these kinds of simple images to try and see details, parts of the story?
By reducing an image to just the brightest and darkest bits it reveals details that would otherwise pass you by. You’ll probably know of my minor obsession for Big Moon and Big Sun images and I know one of my reasons for loving to seek them out is those surprises that often appear in the viewfinder. This is the top of a pillar on our Forth Road Bridge - who knew it had so much going on up there? We are left thinking about the stuff we can’t see, either in darkness or out of shot.
People in silhouette obviously lose a huge amount of detail - colour and light - but if the shot is carefully composed and timed it can bring much more interesting character - with just an outline. “Street” photographers have been using this characteristic ever since the birth of photography, and artists for many centuries before that. Photographers will often choose to shoot a silhouette because it has the advantage of a shorter exposure and a better chance of freezing movement, and when you are shooting towards a bright light source like the sun it may be the only choice at that decisive moment.
This is one of my favourite shots I took in my Batman phase. It wasn’t part of the original plan but when I was climbing the hill to my position for a sunset shot that we had envisaged I stopped for a breather. I saw Alan a few hundred metres away with the sun behind him on my immediate horizon, and phoned him to get him exactly in position. He didn’t even need to stand particularly still because the shots were taken at 1/4000 sec with the light from that blazing sun.
I’ve mislaid that Batman outfit but I must dig it out again and do some more of these - it was designed by Alan’s daughter Tierney and is only required to look good as a silhouette so the cape had weights in the pointy bits to hold it down in the wind, and Alan just wore very unbatmanny shorts, trainers and a t-shirt.
Yeah, let’s do more of these this year, and any more silhouettey people ideas you can come up with.
Stripping away the detail in the foreground by underexposing this sunset shot and concentrating on the shapes on the skyline allowed me to celebrate the colour in the sky. I love the profile on that particular descending wall of Edinburgh Castle down the rocky crag it is perched on and ending with the wee teapot thing. Centuries ago some poor sucker would be standing inside , peering into the dark to see if those noises he could hear were marauding bampots with daggers in their teeth climbing the cliff below. It often was.
When the silhouette is reflected it can give you some great shapes which can be very useful compositional tools. Rather than being completely dark I usually prefer there to be wee smidges of light that give some shape to the areas in shadow. When the sky goes crazy like it did this night it’s always tempting to try & capture the widest scene of the whole radgefest, but it’s usually better to slice out one well composed section.
A big 500mm lens can pick out a silhouette from half a mile away - same harbour scene, but up close and personal.
In putting together this article I’ve realised that I’ve taken a ton of silhouette images down at Newhaven, Edinburgh’s inner city fishing village. From wide shots to street style and close-ups, but I think my favourite one from down there is the arctic tern image below, because it was technically difficult, needed lots of attempts and a good slice of luck.
I’m going to get a bit technical here which some people will appreciate but if you’re yawning already & can’t be bothered with that stuff, look away now.
The tern is a fast moving, erratically diving and darting flyer so to get the shot I had to use a relatively high ISO of 800 which gives you a grainier (noisier) image. Using Aperture Priority mode I choose the aperture and the camera decides on the shutter speed. I wanted the lighthouse to be relatively in focus, as well as the bird so I selected an aperture of f10. My camera wanted to see more details than I did (they do that) so I told it to underexpose this image by 2 stops, to get a shutter speed of 1/800 sec. That all means that the tern was rendered as a silhouetted shape and the rest of the scene was either close to black or a bright section.
The success of the shot relied on there being distinct and obvious shapes and no overlaps with the birds and the lighthouse or other dark shapes. From this tern shoot I have dozens of “nearly” images and hundreds of complete duffers but I only need that one decent shot to make it worthwhile.
That might sound complicated but it really isn’t and I can easily teach you the methods I use in a workshop or a One-to-One session at a location of your choice.
I’ll end with this shot of my good pal Jimmy McLellan whose silhouette speaks to me of who he is and what he loves. This was a boys trip to Easdale island last year when four of us spraffed and quaffed and laughed…shared secrets…rewound the clock…dragging memories back into the open…marvelling at each others stupidities…celebrating our victories…toasting our good friends…thanking each other for sharing chunks of our lives…and lots of our passions.
We lost our good friend Jimmy a few weeks ago…far too early…so please drink a wee toast to him…for a life well lived.
Look after yourself and those you love.
Someone emailed to suggest I add a wee tips payment option - for those of you who don’t want to subscribe but would like to offer something as a “Cheers mate, enjoyed that” option. So here it is.