One of the easiest photography projects there is is a silhouette.  All that’s needed is a light background and a dark foreground subject.  That being said, the next step is to find the right subject or picture topic.  That’s the hard part.  It’s not easy to find something interesting if you won’t be able to recognize any details about the subject, because the subject is supposed to be a big shadow.

For the best dark foreground with an interesting background, I usually choose sunsets.  There are lots of possibilities with sunsets.  There’s the play of clouds with the rays of the sun going through them, or the bright red disk hovering on the horizon and reflecting on the surface.  With a sunset background, there’s more than enough time to shoot lots of pictures, but maybe not enough time to prepare for the picture.

A sunset background, with the reddish light, makes the foreground that much darker.  If you shoot the subject with the sun directly behind it you would get nothing but a black shape (the silhouette).  If you’re lucky, you would be able to shoot the sun’s rays as well.

A traditional silhouette would be a profile or side view picture of a person or an object.  If this is too static, you might try a picture of kids playing, but with the sun almost at the edge of the horizon, or at least very low.  This would add more emphasis on the shapes up front.  Pictures are static, and a silhouette makes a picture more static than it already is.  It’s useless to shoot set pictures, like groups or people with the sunset as backdrop, the picture might accidentally turn out as a silhouette.  Instead try to shoot a picture denoting some action, like kids playing.  This would make the shadows in front a lot more interesting.