December 6th, 2006
Thanks for all the traffic! It’s encouraging to have so many people check out the photoshop tutorial I posted yesterday. Thanks also to all the other sites that have linked the article - there’s too many to name here, but I do appreciate it. I’ll have to see about putting together more articles for you.
A few commenters here and on other sites suggested that the technique I posted had alternatives and they are right. Sometimes, it may be possible to use a small aperture and/or a neutral density filter to bring about a lengthy exposure time. The result will be that the people in your photo will be relatively invisible if they are moving - there won’t be enough hitting them in the same place at the same time for the sensor/film plane to pick up their shape.
The difficulty with this technique is that there is a high potential for streaks to appear in your images from where the people were moving. Especially if there is a group of people, you are likely to get a smear where the group moved through your image. And if anyone stops, there will probably be a blurred, ghostly figure showing up in your picture.
Another popular alternative on various sites was to physically eliminate tourists using, baseball bats, guns, or whatever weapon happened to be handy. As frustrating as it can sometime be to wait for people to leave your shot, I can’t endorse this technique. Especially considering the stories I’ve heard about some foreign prisons!
There are also the people decry the removal of tourists from photos altogether. Sure, some people want them in there, but some don’t. I wrote the tutorial for the latter. I shoot both scene with and without tourists. When I want a scene without tour groups in it, it’s nice to have this technique in my bag of tricks.
Lastly, on a non-photo note, I want to say a big thank you to my hosts, Hostrocket for successfully managing a colossal amount of traffic. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my site remained available while getting so flooded with hits.
December 5th, 2006
I have just posted a digital photography and Photoshop tutorial aimed at helping you get tourist-free postcard shots the next time you head out on vacation. It’s a handy trick that has served me well and I hope it can be helpful for you too.
I hope to write more tutorials related to photography and travel photography in particular, so please feel free to send the story to your favourite news and bookmarking sites like digg and del.icio.us. It will motivate me to do more!
October 31st, 2006
CBS News has an article about the current state of image alteration citing a number of famous photo manipulations that have made the news in recent years.
It includes this quote:
“‘The analogy I always like to draw is, imagine a pile of sand […] And when does it go from a couple of grains of sand to a pile? And surely, taking one grain of sand on and off doesn’t fundamentally change the pile of sand. But at some point, it’s no longer a mound of sand, and it’s just a couple grains. But where did that transition happen?’”
June 11th, 2006
A lot of new buyers of Digital SLRs are surprised to learn that the sensor on their camera can become the home to irritating dust particles that will pollute images.
If moving from a film SLR to digital, people sometimes wonder why they never had to clean their film camera with such regularity. The simple reason is because with each new photo, you are working with a new ’sensor’ as the film advances. Combine this with the fact that there is no static electricity roaming around the film plane and you generally don’t have to worry about dust showing up in photos.
Owners of compact digital cameras may be similarly irked by the dust problem inherent to DSLRs. But what these potentially-perplexed new DSLR owners forget is that there is little chance for dust to enter the compact, sealed up digital cameras. With the ability to switch lenses comes the potential for the sensor to be exposed to the dusty outside world.
Happily, there are ways of managing your sensor’s exposure to dust and methods of cleaning it when you do have the problem. Michelle Jones’s article on dust management will help you shoot spotless images.
June 8th, 2006
The Luminous Landscape has a brief, but good article about taking control of the auto settings in Adobe Camera Raw.
I use this trick myself. While I sometimes use the automatic settings as a starting point for processing my images, I find it helpful to begin the process with the image as it appeared in the camera. Once you have changed your defaults so that no adjustments are initially made, it is a quick press of Command/Control + U and you can see the automatic conversion. Going the other way involves a few more button presses.
And like Michael Reichmann notes in the article, it is often the case that the automatic adjustments flatten bracketed exposures into separate images that all look the same. It’s much simpler to view these images initially in their original state than it is to have to uncheck all the boxes that have been adjusted by the auto processing.
May 31st, 2006
Brian Dilg has an interesting gallery of retouching examples that show the before and after of a photo and his thorough adjustments to the original image.
These pictures remind us that in this age of ubiquitous Photoshop trickery, what you see is no longer what you get.
As a side note, this site doesn’t seem to load up properly in Safari, so you might want to check it out in another browser.
Most Popular Tags on dsphotographic.com:
Weblog
