Advanced Silhouettes

After finishing my annual brown bear workshop at Lake Clark National Park in Alaska in 2019, I decided to bum around some of my favorite places in the state and do a week of solo camping. I always try to build in an extra week or two alongside of my workshops, and this time I headed north to the Old Denali Highway.

I love the tundra. I love that expansive landscape where cold and snow begin to exclude the growth of trees, unfolding to the horizon, unbroken, and filled with dwarfed blueberry and crowberry and cranberry and salmonberry and bearberry. And come late August, the whole of the place turns a brilliant deep crimson red as far the eye can see. This landscape is intoxicating to me.

This year, thanks to fires in some places and torrential rains that washed out roads and trapped tourists in other places, I ditched Denali National Park for the old Denali Highway. If you have never heard of this place, you’re not alone. Most people in the lower 48 states know nothing of its existence – though it used to be the only road to access the park. Today, most visitors drive north out of Anchorage by way of Talkeetna. Or south from Fairbanks through Healy. But the original road is a grand adventure, and one that I have wanted to explore for a long time.

One hundred and forty miles of dirt road crossing the open tundra is what remains of the old Denali Highway. That’s 140 miles of dirt and ruts and rocks and mud and tire puncturing gravel. Most travel it in stout 4x4 vehicles with 10 ply tires. I passed three vehicles with flats over the course of two days. Me, I did it in the most hardcore “offroader” I could find in Anchorage: a minivan.

The Old Denali Highway is flanked by the Alaskan Range to the north. This is an odd arc of a mountain range, running from Lake Clark on the other side of Cook Inlet, north to Denali itself, at over 20,000 feet in elevation, and then east all the way across the middle of Alaska ending around the Canadian border. The shape of this range traps cold air masses as well as storms that roll in from the Gulf of Alaska. And the result is some of the harshest, snowiest, and coldest weather on the continent – hence the tundra here.

After spending the night camped out next to a muskeg in the taiga where fresh bear tracks could be seen in the mud and the sounds of distant wolf howls could be heard sometime after midnight, I woke to a jaw dropping view of the Alaskan Range. For those of you not who are not fluent in cold weather biome speak, Muskeg is an Ojibwa word meaning grassy bog. The taiga is the edge of the northern tree line where only spruce and firs can survive, albeit stunted – similar the Krummholz of alpine regions on mountains – before falling away to the open tundra. This first photograph was created next to my camp the first morning.

As photographers we are always up against the challenge of rendering a three dimensional situation into two very flat dimensions. Both wildlife and landscape photographers alike struggle with this and employ a variety of techniques to create the illusion of depth and dimension. One of these techniques is to find ways to compose with layers.

Layers add interest in our photographs. They create depth. They create the illusion of three dimensions. They can be the proverbial foreground, middle ground, and background. Or they can simply come together to create one hell of an interesting backdrop through repeating patterns.

There are many different ways to create layers in photographs. The most common means of doing this with wildlife photography is to get very low to your subject which effectively turns the foreground, middle ground, and background into three very distinct and separate compositional layers. But this is only one means of doing so. Another, is by working with back lighting across big spaces.

Light is my favorite way of creating the illusion of depth and dimension. But to do this with light, you need contrast. You need shadows and highlights to illuminate and define edges. Frontal lighting, and overcast lighting for that matter, destroys the sense of depth and dimension in our photographs because it fills in these shadows and highlights. Both of those types of light have their place and their strengths. It’s just that creating depth, dimension, and volume is not one of them. However, as the angle of the light changes, as it moves and becomes side lighting and beyond, highlights and shadows begin to be expressed and we create that sense of three dimensions.  

As the light continues to wrap around behind the subject, under normal circumstances, the composition begins to flatten out again. Take a look at the individual layers in these two photographs. The mountains are completely flat. There is no depth to them what so ever. They stand like paper cut outs.

Basic silhouettes are made or broken by the shape and form of your subject or solid objects in the composition. Because these are back lit scenarios, everything that is solid turns black. Thus, the stronger the shape and the more instantly recognizable the shape of the subject, the better the photograph.

As a rule of thumb in these situations, you never want to compose in such a way where two solid objects are intersecting. The reason for this is that as silhouettes, as featureless black shapes, they join together into one. So, with these things colliding in the composition, they blend together and create little more than black blobs.

That is, unless you have great distance between these objects.

Most of the time when we are working with silhouettes, we are taking one subject and surrounding it with light and color. Maybe it’s a bird. Maybe it’s a moose, or a horse. It doesn’t matter. Usually the subject is relatively close.” The composition is very simple. And, in fact, in most situations, the simpler the composition is with a silhouette or backlit photograph, the fewer the “compositional elements,” the stronger the over all photograph. But such rules are meant to be broken. It’s just that we have to understand how and why this simplification of the composition works so well in order to successfully break such rules of thumb.

When we pull away, when we back off from the scene and we begin to work with distances that span miles rather than feet / yards / meters, in other words, when we begin to work with big silhouetted landscapes, we open ourselves up to whole new possibilities.

All the basic considerations still apply of course, such as shape and form and the need for light to surround the important elements in the composition. But, the further apart these elements are from each other, the greater distance between the thing that would have otherwise turned black and blended together, the more atmospheric “stuff” we are going to contend with that will reflect light. And that reflected light creates the sense of space between those solid objects.

This variation in haze, or particles in the air, thus allows us to stack solid objects one on top of each other without everything bleeding together.

As you can see, this can be a touch more complicated to pull off than a typical silhouette. Hence the title of all of this being Advanced Silhouettes. Not all situations work like this. Not all scenarios are going to offer themselves up for landscape silhouettes. But, when they do, they can create something magical.

Though using this technique is all about showing off a landscape, this does not mean that you should only be thinking in terms of landscape photography. Looking at the second photograph, you can see what I mean by this.

The animal in the foreground is immediately recognizable as a bear. You can instantly register this because of the distinct profile of the bear. This is all standard stuff for creating any silhouette. Shape and form. An immediately recognizable outline of the primary subject, and light coming in all around that subject so it stands out from the rest of the composition. In this case, that light is just being reflected off the water.

This part is all straight forward and is exactly how all good silhouettes are created. But the composition is more than just a silhouette of a bear. And this is where the “advanced” part comes into play.

In a situation like this, you have two options. The first is to move in closer to the bear and capture a silhouette against the water. The story you will tell is a simple one: bear silhouetted against the water. Not that this can’t be fabulous, it’s just that the story cannot go beyond that.

Photographed from distance like this however, suddenly we find ourselves lost in a complex world and complex story to go along with it. There is still the bear of course, only he takes up a mere 1% or so of the composition. Therefore, the bear is no longer the primary subject. The bear is obvious, and anchors the photograph, but when all the layers are stacked one on top of another, the sum becomes far greater than the parts.

Make sense?

Working with grand silhouettes like these is all about distance between objects and carefully finetuning the compositional layout of the layers created by that distance.

These types of photographs are easiest to create when you are working with a static landscape. Let’s face it, the light is moving fast enough as it is to get all the elements to come together. The last thing you need to contend with as you are experimenting with these types of compositions for the first time is an animal moving through the scene as well.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to being able to see this sort of stuff to begin with. And to do that, you need to get outside and start studying the way light and shadows interact with each other. Once you pull this off with a static landscape photograph like the first image here, you will have created a search image in your mind that will have you forever subconsciously analyzing potential situations for in the future.