While I stopped to catch a photo of one of my favourite bridges at sunrise yesterday morning, a young man walking his dog passed me. I didn’t hear him coming, so I wasn’t prepared to add him to the photo.

Normally, if I was purposely doing a silhouette photo, I’d take the time to set up both the focus and exposure for the shot and it would be a very planned photo.

I decided to quickly take the photo anyways and see what I could do in post processing.

Unfortunately, there was too much dark (trees and grasses) near the subject to create a good silhouette. He needed to be farther along down the path with more sky around him.

Here’s the original:

Photo Note: I used the curves tool in Snapseed to darken my subject, and then used the Touch Retouch app to remove the lens flare on the ground in front of him. I had to do some cloning to compensate for the large area the lens flare had taken up. I’m not 100% happy with the end result (my feature photo) and will likely work on this photo more to see if I can get it to where I want it to be.

In photography, a silhouette is defined as an outline that appears dark against a light background. More specifically, it is where your subject is seen as a black shape without detail against a brighter background. This is an artistic outcome that many photographers like to perfect.

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