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Arched Near-Silhouette
Style
fine art
Setting
window
Lighting
window back
Wardrobe
robe
Pose
silhouette
Coverage
implied

Recreate this look

Arched Near-Silhouette

Lighting

  1. Pick a bright but overcast day and shoot in the middle of it. Grey is the friend here rather than the compromise: direct sun through the glass is hard to control and leaves hard beams across the room.
  2. Put the window directly behind you and stand between it and the camera. The light comes from behind, so what the frame keeps is your shape and your lit edges.
  3. Close a sheer curtain across the glass if you have one — a white bedsheet or a gauzy scarf pinned up works just as well. It turns a bright rectangle into a soft glow and keeps the window from burning out.
  4. Turn the room lights off, so the only light in the frame is the one behind you.
  5. This is the one setup where what you tap decides the frame, because it sets the exposure — how bright or dark the picture comes out. Put a cushion or a folded coat where you will be to tap against, since you cannot tap your own body from behind the phone. Tapping the bright window drops you to a dark, clean outline; tapping the stand-in keeps your face and your skin visible with the window glowing behind. Decide which you want before the timer starts — they are two different frames.
  6. Whichever you chose, nudge the slider a little the other way to stop the window going to a flat white void. A window that still shows a hint of what is behind it is what makes this look expensive.

Camera

  1. Book about an hour of the room to yourself — twenty minutes to set up and get one test frame right, the rest to shoot. The light decides which hour of the day; knowing nobody is due back is what lets the rest of it be enjoyable. Stopping early is a finished session too.
  2. The photographs stay on your phone. Nothing here uploads anything and nothing is sent anywhere; nobody sees a frame unless you show it, and you can delete any or all of them at any point. That is what makes it safe to take far more than you need, which is what the rest of these steps ask you to do.
  3. What to wear is named by the look itself — a robe, a slip, a shirt, a set. Read it as a shape and a mood rather than a shopping list: your own version, something you already own and like the feel of, photographs better than anything bought new for the occasion. Soft, worn-in fabric drapes and moves when you move; stiff new fabric holds its creases and reads as a costume.
  4. What goes underneath, or does not, is yours to decide and nothing here needs to know it. If you are unsure, start more covered than you think you want — the robe closed, a shirt over the top — and open it up later, once you have seen a few frames you like. Taking a layer off part way through is easy; talking yourself back into one is not.
  5. Expect the first few minutes to feel ridiculous. They do for everybody, and the feeling lifts at about the point you stop watching yourself and start adjusting the frame. Shoot a run you fully intend to delete, delete it, and carry on — that run is the warm-up, not a waste of one.
  6. Put the phone on a tripod. A cheap phone tripod, a stack of books, or anything that holds it still will do — everything in these instructions assumes the phone is not in your hand.
  7. Set the self-timer to ten seconds — the setting that counts down after you press the button and then takes the picture on its own, so nothing is touched while you are in position. Look for a clock or a stopwatch symbol among the camera's options, and choose ten rather than three: ten is enough to get back, settle and take a breath, and three is not. A small remote does the same job with no countdown.
  8. Wipe the lens with a soft cloth before you start. It is the single commonest reason a whole run comes out hazy.
  9. Set the height to the middle of your body as you will be positioned in the frame — chest height if you are standing, and level with the middle of you if you are sitting or lying down. Keep the phone level rather than tilted down at you.
  10. Stand back two to three metres for a whole-body frame and closer for anything tighter. Backing off and letting the frame be wide is more flattering than getting close, on every phone.
  11. Before you look at yourself, look at what is behind you. Take one frame and read the back of it rather than the front — a laundry basket, a full clothes rail, a bright towel, a cable trailing across a corner. You will shoot ten frames you love and notice all of it afterwards, so two minutes of clearing is the cheapest improvement on this list.
  12. Your phone focuses on whatever you tap, and you cannot tap yourself from behind it: tap while standing at the phone and the focus lands on the far side of the room rather than on you. So give it a stand-in — a cushion, a folded coat or a pillow stood on end, exactly where you will be and at roughly the height of your face. The one you used to set the exposure will do.
  13. Tap the screen on the stand-in and hold your finger there until the camera says the focus is locked; most show a small badge or a padlock when it is, and locking is what stops the phone going hunting the moment you move. Then take the stand-in away, start the timer and get into position.
  14. Take one test frame, look at it properly, and fix the height, the framing and the focus before you shoot anything else. It wants to be sharp on you rather than on what is behind you. Two minutes here saves a whole run.
  15. Then shoot a run rather than a single frame, either way round: burst mode, where holding the picture button down gives you a stream of frames in a couple of seconds, or a repeating timer, where one countdown fires three or ten shots a few seconds apart. Find out which your camera offers while you are still setting up. Ten frames and a choice beats one frame and a hope.
  16. Hold the phone upright, in portrait orientation.
  17. Set the camera app's aspect ratio to 4:5 if it offers one — the aspect ratio is just the shape of the frame, how tall it is against how wide, and most apps list two or three shapes to choose between near the button you take pictures with. If yours does not offer 4:5, shoot the standard upright frame and crop to 4:5 afterwards — leave a little room above your head and below you so the crop has somewhere to go.
  18. Your face is deliberately not in this frame — turned away, dropped, or screened by hair. Check the test frame from a step back: a half-caught profile is obvious at a glance and easy to miss on a small screen while you are setting up.

Posing

  1. Put yourself between the light and the camera, with the window bright directly behind you — standing, kneeling or seated, whichever this look asks for. Everything in this family follows from that one order and nothing else does: light behind, you in the middle, camera in front.
  2. Turn side-on to the lens, in full profile. A silhouette is an outline and nothing else, and an outline seen from the front carries almost no shape at all.
  3. Now lengthen whatever is carrying you. Standing: take your weight onto the back foot and lift the front heel a little. Kneeling: sit tall up over your heels instead of settling back down onto them. Sitting: press down through the hip you are on and grow up out of it. The outline is all you have here, so the longest line you can find through your body is the whole frame.
  4. Let a soft arch come into your lower back. That curve is what the light traces, and in a silhouette it does more work than it does anywhere else.
  5. Keep a visible gap between your arms and your body — a hand on your hip with the elbow held out, an arm lifted overhead into the light, both hands gathering your hair off your neck. An arm resting against your side merges into the outline and takes the shape with it.
  6. Check the same for your legs: standing, cross them at the ankle or step one forward; kneeling or sitting, let one knee ride up or fall away from the other. Either way you want a little daylight showing somewhere between them. Two legs pressed together read as one shape.
  7. Lengthen your neck and lift your chin towards the light. The jaw and the throat are among the few details an outline can show, so give them room.
  8. Let your hair be part of the outline. Lifted off the neck, gathered in one hand, or loose and catching the light at its edges — all of them read, and hair flattened against the shoulders does not.
  9. Accept that your face will be in shadow, and treat that as the point rather than a compromise. This is the most private frame in the library and one of the most flattering, because detail dissolves into shape.
  10. Hold still. There is nothing to hold and no eye contact to keep, so the only job left is stillness, and the backlight does the rest.
  11. Take a test frame and look at the outline alone, ignoring everything inside it. If the shape reads clearly at a glance, the frame is finished; if it does not, open a gap somewhere and try again.
Coming with free accounts: saving this look to your favourites, dropping it straight into a shoot plan, and pose notes adjusted to your space and comfort level. Until then, the recipe above is the whole thing — print it, or keep it open on your phone. Grab the free checklist and we'll email you the moment accounts open.