f-stop Friday - Fishing Boat in Silhouette

Fishing Boat in Silhouette, originally uploaded by Snakelover61.

While Mindy and I were in Boston, we went on a whale watching trip. I hope to blog more about that later, but for now I want to share with you one of the pictures from that little excursion.

Creating a silhouette like this is pretty easy. All you really need is a good amount of difference in lighting between the subject and the background. In other words, high contrast. Of course, it's better if the subject is readily recognizable just by its outline. Then you simply underexpose the subject. In this case, I literally only had to point and shoot because almost everything the light meter was reading was brighter than the fishing boat.

This was already a silhouette straight off the camera, but more hazy and "bland" than what you see here. So I did a little post-shot processing, tweaking the brightness, contrast and saturation levels to arrive at this. I also cropped for a more pleasing (to me) composition.

Peaceful, isn't it? Can you hear the sea gulls? Smell the ocean? Feel the breeze on your face?

Enjoy your weekend!