Silhouette photography

To shoot successful silhouette photography you first need to choose a subject that can be identified by its two-dimensional shape.

Step by step how to shoot silhouette photography
01 Find your position
The best time for shooting silhouettes is at the beginning or end of the day, when the sun is low in the sky. You don’t necessarily need to have the sun directly behind the subject, it just needs to be in front of you. Hunt out the camera angle that shows the best outline of your subject.



02 Turn off Active D-Lighting or Auto Lighting Optimizer
By default, your camera will likely have some sort of dynamic range enhancing feature to pull more detail from shadow areas.These features essentially adjust the contrast in your picture, helping you to pull maximum detail from shadows. For shooting silhouette photography, you need to turn this Off.

03 Get up to speed
Set your camera to Aperture Priority mode, and use a low ISO setting of between 100-200 to avoid noise. Set a mid-aperture of around f/8, as this should help minimise the amount of chromatic aberration (colour fringing) which can be a particular problem when shooting into the sun.

04 Exposure compensation
With the settings you have now, silhouettes will not be dark enough, so you must use exposure compensation. You will typically need to dial in a setting of between -1 to -3 EV (the more sky in the shot, the less negative compensation you will need).

http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2012/11/09/silhouette-photography-tips-for-shooting-into-the-sun/