Everyone Can Create Photo Silhouettes

A blog by @mircwalsh

Everyone Can Create Photo Silhouettes

About a year ago we used the All About Me template from the Apple Teacher Platform to create some customised silhouettes filled with student’s hobbies and interests.

You can find the old blog post from that activity here 

Fast forward a year and thanks to Everyone Can Create we are now doing the same but with customised silhouettes. This addition allows students to learn about lighting and photography basics.

Students start off with taking their silhouette against a well lit background. We found that doorways and windows worked well for this.

Next up students would edit the photo in photos to increase/ decease the contrast and use markup to draw in any spots that needed lightening or darkening. Once the silhouette was complete they brought it into Keynote and added shapes.

With one class we used this method for all photos and got the following results.

For the second group we took a different approach and instead of working with photos and markup students instead brought their photos directly into keynote and lowered the opacity of the silhouette before drawing around it with Apple Pencil and filling with a colour of their choice. This gave a different type of look to the silhouettes.

While the first method was slightly more tedious for students to do there are lessons to be learned from both methods.

You can find more guidance in the Everyone Can Create Photo Book which can be downloaded for free here