When I am hired to shoot couple portraits during engagement, wedding or honeymoon photo services, I often use the silhouette technique. By calibrating shadows and lights one can get photographs focused on the bodies’ edges, leaving aside the color of the hair, the facial expressions, the details of the outfit and, in some cases, even the beauty of the surrounding landscape.
In most cases the final result are the black images of the bodies with their edges fully marked. If the couple are kissing or hugging it looks like having caught the true shape of love! Indeed, silhouette photographs are able to highlight the couple’s feelings much more than the bodies’ or the background’s features. This photography technique aims at catching the real spirit of the subject, almost disregarding the faces’ beauty, the make-up details and the attire’s elegance. It rather portrays the real “bond” of the couple.
For this reason silhouette photographs of different couples look much more similar to each other than those shot with other techniques.They seem to prove that, even if there are millions couples, as the Russian poet Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius had it, “love is one, one and always one.”
Have a look at some of my couple photo portraits on my website.
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