Silhouettes - Technique Tuesday

A few weeks ago we were at this park. Amelia and Quinn were running back and forth through this tunnel laughing hysterically. I just kept taking photos hoping that I could catch the joy in their faces but I knew the lighting was working against me. When I looked at this series of photos on my camera, I will admit that I was bummed because I didn't capture their facial expressions and that is what I REALLY wanted to capture. My pictures got downloaded onto the computer and I didn't even give this series of photos another thought.

Then the other night I was going through photos and this one stopped me in my tracks. I just stared at the computer screen however this time I looked at it in a whole different light. When I really looked at this photo, I found so many things that I loved about it that I didn't see the first time that I saw it. I love that you can see they are in motion...I love the profile shot of Quinn looking at Amelia as he runs by her side...I love the texture of the actual tunnel itself. Although I cannot see their sweet faces laughing, I can hear their laughter when I look at their silhouette. I could have totally disregarded this photo but I looked deeper and found things that I love about it and went with what I had.

I love this silhouette. Here is the original photo...





Although "technically" I added the frame as my last step on this page, I thought you might like to see how it would have looked with just the photo in place.




When I started on this page, I immediately knew that I wanted to make it look like they were running out into the sunset. I decided to extract part of the photo so that just their silhouette and the tunnel remained. Sometimes extractions can be more complicated but this was a simple one. I just used the magnetic lasso tool and traced the edge of the tunnel opening as well as their silhouettes and hit delete. It was as simple as that.

Then I found some beautiful paper by Lynn Grieveson, added some word art, framed it and that was it. The whole page took me less than 20 minutes. I love it when that happens. Here is the end result...

I thought you might like to see some other examples of how I have used silhouettes. I think I wrote about this photo on a previous blog but I will recap. We were outside playing and the chemical truck came to treat our yard. I had to run inside and told the kids to stay in the garage and not go on the grass. When I came back out, I found my daughter and son sitting like this in the garage waiting. This is another photo that I may have disregarded had I not looked deeper. On the surface, I see two kids sitting in a dirty garage next to my van watching a big white truck with a hose coming out of it, spraying icky chemicals on our yard. However, when I removed all of that "stuff", I found a silhouette of a brother and sister who adore one another.

Here is the page that I created with it...

Here is a picture of my husband and our two daughters from years ago. I love this picture. I decided to use this picture for an art journaling class taught by Pattie Knox at Getting It Scrapped. I LOVE learning from Pattie...she is brilliant, she is fun and she is one of the kindest people that I have ever met. By the way, her self-paced classes are all on sale through September 1st.

Here is the page that I created with this photo. This page was published in Somerset Memories 2011 Spring issue.

I created the silhouettes simply by extracting the individuals and then creating a new layer above them. After creating a new layer above them, I filled the silhouette in with black. You can also see that I did some shadow work on these silhouettes. I did a shadow tutorial here if you are interested.

I think it is so important that when you look at your photos, you find their strengths. We are not going to capture the perfect shot every time but if we can "look through different glasses" and find things we love about the photo, we can create meaningful images that capture the heart of the moment. I hope that you look at your photos a little differently after this blog post.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!