[BruceBanner]

Ok, this might be considered landscape also, but is there a good way to get a shot at a popular tourist location and somehow orchestrate the shot so that tourists are not visible after the fact?

So for example, lets say I head down to the Sydney Opera House steps, and I want to get a really nice and fairly wide portrait shot of someone, perhaps sitting on the stairs.I want it wide enough that perhaps the subject is close to me but that lots of stairs are visible and even some of the opera house as well, and of course we're doing this midday.

Doing a shot like this pretty much guarantees yer gonna have tourists everywhere in the background.

My thinking was if the shot was taken tripodded, and then the subject removes themselves from the picture (after the first shot), and I continue to shoot a few more pics after the fact, maybe one every 30secs (from the exact same angle), and let it do that for say 5mins, then when I get back to home to edit, hopefully stacking all the images and using masks I can successfully rid myself of all the other folk?

Is this strategy on the right path? Is there a better way?

Cheers,

Bruce

[pinholecam]

Yes, thats the usual way.

In practice though and especially in this age of narcissism with the selfie, you can have people standing at a spot taking and admiring themselves on the phone and then retaking and then repeating this process for quite a while.

[BullsOnParade81]

If you use a nd filter with at least 10 stops you should have a long enough exposure that hopefully they are not in the shot long enough to be in final image.

[gatorguy]

If you use a nd filter with at least 10 stops you should have a long enough exposure that hopefully they are not in the shot long enough to be in final image.

I was going to suggest much the same.

Pentaxforums has an article about that here:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/articles/photo-articles/basic-guide-long-exposure-photography.html

EDIT: Just noticed you want to keep that one person in the shot. Your initial idea is probably the way to go.

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Last edited by gatorguy; 01-23-2018 at 06:49 AM.

[derelict]

If you do not have a big stopper, use the composition option in camera. Set up the intervals and shoot a set. It can make people go away.

[honey bo bo]

Making Tourists Disappear

Back before the turn of the Century in the 80's we had a retouching process using Kodak etching spray and pencil crayons that we could take out any unwanted portion of the image and blend into the background. It was particularly useful in a Full Service Wedding / Divorceing Photography Studios. Unfortunately I don't have an example handy and a lot of the retouching work was lost during divorce proceedings when the Marital Home was burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances!

[BrianR]

If you opt for the multiple image approach, you can use the 'median' stack mode in photoshop. It will save time with the masking and automagically remove most things that move through your frames, keeping only the stuff that doesn't move. You'd want to selectively handle the inclusion of your subject though, slight shifts during your exposure and hitting them with median will mess them up.

[photoptimist]

Multiple images + median filtering is the way to go but 5 minutes may not be long enough if someone is eating lunch, reading a book, or romantically enmeshed on the steps. When you first set up the shot, you can try to judge who are the short-term strollers and who are the long-term sitters and compose your image accordingly.

It can help if you capture the scene on a phone or tablet first so you can keep track of who has moved and who hasn't.

The approach of using a very dark ND filter or using the camera's interval composite (with averaging) provides an interesting alternative because the background tourists become blurred ghosts rather than totally disappearing. This approach can be used to blur even the lunch eaters who never leave the scene within the total time frame you've allotted for the picture.

[Kerrowdown]

Making Tourists Disappear

We just introduce 'em to our local beastie.

[BrianR]

Multiple images + median filtering is the way to go but 5 minutes may not be long enough if someone is eating lunch, reading book, or romantically enmeshed on the steps. When you first set up the shot, you can try to judge who are the short-term strollers and who are the long-term sitters and compose your image accordingly.

Several options to remove stubborn/lazy tourists:

• Break out the bagpipes.
• Remove an article of clothing every minute. Few people stick around to see me down to the thong.
• Ask people for "A moment of their time to talk about life insurance".
• Release the pigeons and scatter the birdseed around them.
• At the Opera House? I'm belting "O sole mio". Their lunch will curdle, even if they have no dairy products.

A plus to the multiple image approach is you only need them gone for one frame to manually patch in a clone job for the stubborn folk.

[RGlasel]

fairly wide portrait shot of someone

That's the first flaw I saw in your strategy, as much as I'm a fanatic for adding context to the photos I take, I always end up with lousy results unless I can get lots of isolation for the primary subject. You could clear the crowd by yelling "He's got a gun!" or put your subject far enough away from the steps or other reference point to make the background actors much smaller than your primary subject. Usually the crowd thins out as you get further away from steps, doorways, statues and sidewalks. If you want the ghosting effect of long or multiple exposures, your subject has to stay extremely still to remain sharp in the final image, hence it usually works best with inanimate subjects. Even the very best masking tools in PP will somewhat reduce the sharpness of your final image, so photoshopping works best with smaller images or images where the offending artifacts are somewhat isolated from the good artifacts that you want to keep in the image. Its always better to keep a little distance in photos between your favorite niece and the useless twit she married so you can take him out of the picture when their relationship inevitably goes south.

[RGlasel]

I'll add some lame, slightly relevant examples below. The first picture is taken at 15mm, the second 18mm and the third was taken at 88mm and then cropped to be more like 135mm. The first two just have the tops and bottoms cropped. I will also mention that the DA 15 is so wide it makes every crowd look relatively sparse. To get a "Where's Waldo" shot, I would have been better off at 35mm and f8.

[Bob 256]

Something no one mentioned is to visit the site on early Sunday which is a time most people will be elsewhere or in bed. Some movies make use of particular times of the day when crowds are well thinned out and sometimes traffic is not present to get their shots. Of course that doesn't work if your shot is confined to a particular time by other constraints.

One problem you'll run into by taking a series of shots is changes in lighting. The sun and shadows will move. How much of a problem that is depends on your particular shot and its lighting.

If you do opt for multiple shots, you might include your model in a number of them, which would give you different poses to choose from and at the same time, allow erasure of moving objects.

[Wheatfield]

Ok, this might be considered landscape also, but is there a good way to get a shot at a popular tourist location and somehow orchestrate the shot so that tourists are not visible after the fact?

So for example, lets say I head down to the Sydney Opera House steps, and I want to get a really nice and fairly wide portrait shot of someone, perhaps sitting on the stairs.I want it wide enough that perhaps the subject is close to me but that lots of stairs are visible and even some of the opera house as well, and of course we're doing this midday.

Doing a shot like this pretty much guarantees yer gonna have tourists everywhere in the background.

My thinking was if the shot was taken tripodded, and then the subject removes themselves from the picture (after the first shot), and I continue to shoot a few more pics after the fact, maybe one every 30secs (from the exact same angle), and let it do that for say 5mins, then when I get back to home to edit, hopefully stacking all the images and using masks I can successfully rid myself of all the other folk?

Is this strategy on the right path? Is there a better way?

Cheers,

Bruce

There is an action in the full Photoshop suite that does what you want. If you do a google search you will find some how to articles on the subject.

[LensBeginner]

Another potential issue is that there will be spots where people will be more likely to be, and others where they won't.
In other words, it could take like 2' to get 75% of the image free from passersby (with something like 5-10 shots), and 15 more minutes to get the remaining 25%.

That's especially true for mass-tourism locations... you'll often get queues of people waiting to get a picture of a landmark or take a selfish in said place. Good luck getting a picture with nobody in those spots...