johnrochaphoto.net

I’m not a wedding photographer. I say that because I’ve recently been chatting to a wedding photographer and I’ve been asked to be Best Man at a wedding next week. That’s why I’m a bit late in posting. It’ll be interesting to see the local lads at work too.

Anyway back to rubbing people out. We had two layers so let’s go and choose the upper layer.

We’re going to use a destructive method for this on the upper layer using the Eraser Tool.

Choose a soft round brush and rub out the people you don’t like! The result should be something like this.

Now we’ll go down and choose the background layer.

We’re going to make a selection here that will cover the same area and a bit more. There are several ways of doing this but for the moment let’s try the rectangular marquee.

and make a section covering the area we want to replace.

Then we can copy and paste this selection above the bottom layer so it looks like this:

Now we can go up and select the top layer again.

Our pasted selection will show through under the top layer but because we didn’t use a tripod it will clearly be misaligned and won’t match up properly:

so we’ll have to move the selection about a bit. For this we must choose our pasted selection and use the move tool to position it correctly.

If we carefully move the selection about we might get the correct result straight away like this. And then we’ll have successfully rubbed out the people we don’t like.

Exactly how easy this is depends on how accurately aligned the two original images were.

It really is better to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by digital imaging by thinking ahead and preparing in advance.

Of course we’re still left with the person sitting on the bench – but that’s a story for another time.

If I survive the wedding, I’ll be back soon.

Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing, China

This is just to show how I managed to wait long enough to get a clear view of the wall. But I had to crop it fairly tightly still.

OK, let’s get down to eliminating people we don’t like.

Let’s get back to a Stroll in the Park.

two variations of a digital photograph a “Stroll in the Park”

One of the great things about digital imaging is that there are so many new approaches to solving problems and if one doesn’t work you can try another.

As I said in my last post, you often can’t wait until there are no people in your picture. So here’s another approach:

Take a series of pictures which are basically the same except that the people have moved on.

(There’s a ‘right’ way of doing this which is to put the camera on a solid tripod, set manual exposure, and use a cable or remote release to trigger the shutter. This will ensure that all the main elements of your scene are accurately aligned.)

In this case I took the pictures handheld.

The idea is to replace elements from one picture with some from the other until you have the perfect composite.

This will need some computer manipulation and just to emphasize that any programme with layers will do I’m going to use my Photoshop Elements version 2.

First of all, I’ll have to open both the pictures.

When I’ve opened them I’ll want to see them both together on the screen and so I’ll choose the tile option.

Then I’ll choose the move icon so that I can copy one picture over the other.

If I drag the move tool with my mouse over the second picture while holding down the SHIFT key, the pictures should align perfectly on two separate layers.

The cursor changes to show I’ve copied the image and can release the SHIFT key.

Voila! I now have my two pictures on two separate layers.

Now I have the pictures in position and I’m ready to get on with recreating the single composite.

One way of doing this will be in the next post.

A Stroll in Boris Gardens, Sofia, Bulgaria

Is this a travel photograph?

I suppose it depends if you believe that a travel photograph can be taken, where you live, even more or less just across the road from where you live in your own backyard so to speak.

In other words, to take a travel photograph does the photographer have to travel? And does he or she have to travel any particular distance?

This is something I think worth thinking about because the stereotype of travel photography is where somebody visits some far-flung location and brings back pictures to their home turf.

Now, obviously lots of people live in these places and quite likely there are photographers living there too.

And if you go to any country – go to Greece – go to Italy – go to China anywhere you’ll find that the local photographers have been busy.

Many manuals on travel photography advise you to look at the local postcards so that you can see the standard views.

Really, that’s just a thought, but I’m not dealing with this photograph just as whether or not it’s a travel photograph but because it’s got people in it.

You can have a lot of views about people in pictures.

I suppose many of you have stood in front of some well known world site – I well remember many years ago standing in front of the Nine Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing in China while crowds and crowds of local Chinese stood in line to have their photographs taken.

Sometime they roped me in to photograph their groups.

And I was just hoping there might be just a moment when I could take a photograph with nobody in it.

As it happened I was successful and I was quite pleased about this because I wanted a photograph simply of the wall itself.

I also remember many many years ago when I was very young photographer, and I was a member of various photographic clubs and societies, and there was a lot of discussion there about how people brought scale to the picture.

How people in just the right position would make the picture

How the right kind of people for example, some old peasant walking down the track in Tuscany rather than somebody in jeans and a baseball cap would give the appropriate local colour.

I also read in the photo press about how successful photographers would take their family members around with red coats on so that they could ask them to pose discreetly in various parts of the picture.

All of this deals with what you might call the aesthetics and integrity of photography.

This blog is at least partly concerned with Stock Photography.

One of the great problems in Stock Photography is people.

It’s a simple problem.

The stock photo that is the most successful is the one that can be used in every possible circumstance. It can be used in both editorial contexts – that is in newspapers and magazines where it is considered reasonable and acceptable to have people in the picture going around their everyday business and they have no cause for complaint and in commercial contexts.

If, however, a photograph is used in a more commercial context and particularly in advertising, then you simply can’t have a photograph of a recognizable person unless that person has actually given their consent to be photographed and has a clear understanding of the particular rights of the photographs.

Let me give you an example.

I remember reading of a photographer who had not done this when he described how he took a picture of his friend, a young woman, and later on, it was published in a newspaper with an advertisement for birth control pills.

If I remember rightly this young woman was a devout Roman Catholic and she was very very unhappy about this and quite rightly so. Being a friend she didn’t sue!

So the rule is no people in photographs, unless they have signed a Model Release.

A Model Release is a legal document, where people clearly and explicitly say that they have agreed that the photograph can be used in certain contexts.

Quite often the contexts have to be specified quite clearly.

Now, it’s fairly obvious there are going to be some problems if you go in for people photography.

There are those, I suppose, who believe that if you take a picture of a mountain shepherd in Bulgaria. or a camel rider in Egypt, that is unlikely that they are going to either see their photographs used for publicity or that they are going to complain about it.

On the other hand, even if you could talk to them and get them to sign a form it might be very, very difficult unless the form were in a language they understood.

And this is where there’s only one or two people.

When there’s a whole bunch of people it’s clearly quite impossible to get a model release from all of them.

So one of the things that you sometimes have to do is to see how you can take a photograph with no people in it.

My photograph has I think three people in it.

Usually the rules of commercial photography are that the people should not be recognizable.

(Anybody who has seen the cult Antionini film, “Blow Up” with David Hemmings playing the fashion photographer will know that recognizing people in photographs taken in parks can be quite a tricky business.)

If we take the three people concerned in my picture, you might argue that the figure sitting on the bench on the left could not be recognized but I would not want to be on the receiving end of a legal argument on that.

The two men walking along the path in front of the trees are clearly recognizable.

Now the question is, how can we get rid of them?

There are whole range of choices and some of them are made possible only now that we have come to the age of digital imaging.

What are the options now?

Once again, I could wait.

The trouble with waiting is that while some people disappear from the viewfinder frame, other people soon appear and if your pictures takes in a very wide sweep, it’s really quite difficult to wait for a moment when there are no people there.

If you have somebody sitting on a bench, and you don’t want them to be in the picture, one of your choices is to wait until they move

This might be a very long time and meanwhile of course, the whole lighting situation might have changed.

If the people are walking along it seems to me that there are a number of options that you can take.

The most obvious way of dealing with people in a picture is to use various copying and cloning techniques to take them out.

This needs quite a high level of skill and if the people are fairly prominent in the picture it really isn’t easy to do this in a way that makes it absolutely undetectable.

So, I think that now that we have digital imaging there might be other ways of dealing with this problem.