Almost every photographer has experienced this: You want to get pictures of a building or a landscape and there's too many people around.
I've had times when I just wanted to unload a fire-extinguisher-sized can of pepper spray on people who were ruining my otherwise good shot. But there are a couple ways to make the crowds disappear that won't get you a criminal record.
However, both require an investment of time — and a tripod.
The first involves the oldest camera trick in the world. It's how early photographers got cityscapes in broad daylight that were devoid of people: Long exposure.
Back in the day when ISO, if it could have been measured, was in the single-to-low-double digits, a photograph could take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two to expose. Most people walking about in such a photo would not register on the plate. Only people who didn't move too much would show up as ghosts, though.
We can achieve the same effect today, even with cameras that have faster sensitivity levels at their lowest end than Louis Daguerre could have imagined possible.
First, mount your camera on a tripod. Unless you are dead, you won't be able to hold it still long enough.
Second, stop down your lens as far as you can and then, if that's not getting you a speed slow enough, put on a neutral-density filter. Variable ND filters, either professional or one you make yourself, will let you adjust it to get the slow speed you want.
(If you really want to go hard-core, use a piece of welding glass, but just remember that you'll have to do some serious white-balance adjustment later.)
Third, use a remote shutter release to take the picture, and if it works out, it should look like a ghost town.
The other way allows you to use more normal shutter speeds but gets you the same result, although it may take more time.
With your camera mounted on a tripod (because you don't want the camera moving around between pictures), take a series of pictures of your subject, making sure that you get people in different spots as you take pictures. Here's the set I shot while visiting The Alamo recently.
I've had times when I just wanted to unload a fire-extinguisher-sized can of pepper spray on people who were ruining my otherwise good shot. But there are a couple ways to make the crowds disappear that won't get you a criminal record.
However, both require an investment of time — and a tripod.
The first involves the oldest camera trick in the world. It's how early photographers got cityscapes in broad daylight that were devoid of people: Long exposure.
Back in the day when ISO, if it could have been measured, was in the single-to-low-double digits, a photograph could take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two to expose. Most people walking about in such a photo would not register on the plate. Only people who didn't move too much would show up as ghosts, though.
We can achieve the same effect today, even with cameras that have faster sensitivity levels at their lowest end than Louis Daguerre could have imagined possible.
First, mount your camera on a tripod. Unless you are dead, you won't be able to hold it still long enough.
Second, stop down your lens as far as you can and then, if that's not getting you a speed slow enough, put on a neutral-density filter. Variable ND filters, either professional or one you make yourself, will let you adjust it to get the slow speed you want.
(If you really want to go hard-core, use a piece of welding glass, but just remember that you'll have to do some serious white-balance adjustment later.)
Third, use a remote shutter release to take the picture, and if it works out, it should look like a ghost town.
The other way allows you to use more normal shutter speeds but gets you the same result, although it may take more time.
With your camera mounted on a tripod (because you don't want the camera moving around between pictures), take a series of pictures of your subject, making sure that you get people in different spots as you take pictures. Here's the set I shot while visiting The Alamo recently.
If you notice, there's always somebody in the picture, but they're not always standing at the same spot. That's going to be important in just a bit.
Bring the photos into Photoshop as layers in the same document and then auto-align your layers. Even if you did this on a tripod, this eliminates any accidental jostling of the camera between shots.
Then, create a smart object with your pictures and, after it has finished that task, set the stacking mode to median. When you do this, Photoshop looks at your pixels as values, and as it compares the different pictures, it will use the pixel that is the average of the collection. What this means is that it will more often than not pick the pixel that has nobody in it and leave you with a scene devoid of people.
It's not a perfect process. In my pictures, the guy in the red shirt didn't move far enough in two pictures, so there was some residual red left on the stones. Plus, the flag was fluttering a bit, which created some interesting ghosting. But the fix is to go back inside the smart object, find a clear spot for that section of the image and copy and paste it into the final picture, making sure you feather it sufficiently so that it doesn't look like a kid used a cutout and that paste-like glue they used to have in elementary schools that you applied with a tongue depressor.
This is what I got:
Look, Ma, no tourists.
