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.

Does digital imaging make photography too easy?

It’s certainly something to think about.

There are lots of photographers who have found making the switch from film to digital very difficult. And some of them just don’t like it.

And of course digital is still not the obvious choice for some types of photography.

There’s nothing new about this.

The influential Victorian photographer, Charles Dodgson, better know to many as Lewis Carrol, author of the famous Alice books, gave up photography in about 1880.

It’s not quite clear why but one reason seems to be that he had mastered the painstaking wet collodion process.

When the new dry developing process was developed he didn’t want to use it. Perhaps photography had become too easy. Anybody could do it.

We’re in a similar situation today. There is an explosion in photography and all sorts of people are taking photographs today using digital cameras who couldn’t, wouldn’t or just didn’t before.

From my point of view, I welcome this. I personally have had no trouble switching.

I think it’s worth thinking, What makes it different? What are the new opportunities created for us as photographers by the current technologies?

And, this take me back to the Sphinx

I’d like to concentrated on three points which are related

• Composition
• Size
• Cropping

Clearly, every time you crop an image to improve or change the composition you take away information from that image. Perhaps in the days when I used a medium format film camera this didn’t matter so much.

But once I made the switch to digital capture it was clear that I didn’t want to do much cropping because the image would get smaller and smaller and small images become pixalated and noisy.

And this is a time when you have to start thinking. Take as an example, the Sphinx.

There is a sort of riddle. I’ve finished with this picture in more or less the square format which I felt suited the subject matter. And to do this I had to crop.

And so I thought that while I was in Giza I would try some things that I wasn’t well prepared for.

Photographers who are well up in taking panoramas and stitching pictures will know that ideally you should have a firm tripod and a panoramic head to ensure that the nodal points of the lens are properly adjusted.

I wasn’t prepared like this so I thought I’d just have a go.

My shooting position was behind quite a high wall at a long distance from the Sphinx.

I was able to balance my camera on the wall. I was using my Canon 350D SLR - a camera with an 8.5 megapixel cropped sensor. Lens choice was my Canon 70-300 IS zoom - a lens which maintains quality at the telephoto end.

I took my pictures as usual - first of all on Programme, shifting the shutter speed when appropriate and then on Manual, carefully checking the histogram to make sure my highlights weren’t blown.

While I was doing this I decided to something else as I didn’t want to end up with small, cropped images.

I switched the camera into portrait format and zoomed in closer and took two images of the Sphinx side by side with some overlap. These are the pictures at the top of my post.

I was careful to use exactly the same manual settings for both.

Because I was a long way away I took the chance that this would have a very small effect in parallax terms.

When I got home I stitched the images manually and using various programmes - some from my local friends. Programmes such as Realviz Stitcher, Arcsoft Panorama Maker and Photoshop.

I found that just for these two images the Photoshop Merge facility did a great job.

So this was my experiment: I wanted to produce a picture which had:

• A square composition

• A high pixel count - ensuring good quality.

I think it worked out pretty well and for me there are some lessons to be learned and this is obviously a technique that can be refined with other static subjects - some more examples later.

The most important lesson is not to become too bogged down by technicalities. It’s the final picture that matters. So,

Have a go.

A dog resting in Luxor

This is another shot from my recent Egyptian trip.

Perhaps this is the real travel photo,

Of course looking at this photo. It doesn’t really give you any idea of place so does it qualify as a travel photo?

Is this dog a particular type of dog? I don’t know. Is there anything about the location that shows where the dog is?

As it happens I was walking through one of the many thousand year old temples near Luxor when I saw this dog walking behind me.

As it clambered on the stones there to have a rest I thought I would take a photograph - I even had time to change to my macro lens and the lighting was pleasant and defused.

Perhaps this dog was a stray dog or maybe it was attached in some way to the administrative staff of the Temple.

But nevertheless the point about it is, that it was taken in a particular location. It did live in a particular place. A place far from my own normal habitat.

So from my point of view, this is just as legitimate as a travel photograph as the photograph of the great Sphinx at Giza.

The problem is that it’s not immediately apparent to the viewer as a single shot that there is anything particular about this dog.

It is just conceivable, although I have no idea, that this is a type of dog found only in Egypt, but as I say I don’t know about that.

I believe that travel photography throws up many many dilemmas of this kind. It’s so easy just to shoot the obvious great sites.

Speaking of course from the purely commercial point of view, if you go to a location such as Egypt, where at least for a lot of the year, the lighting is fairly constant, and if your time is limited anyway, so you can’t choose much concerning what time of day you take photos or indeed in the night, you may very well find that the photographs you take are very similar to those taken by many other competent photographers.

An obvious question then is why should anybody buy your version rather than one of the others?

There are of course some equally obvious answers to this question.

Perhaps it’s the only picture of this particular view sold through your particular agency.

Or maybe there’s something about your photograph that makes it a little bit different.

Another point you can easily see is that the picture of the great Sphinx is a picture of something which has been there for thousands of years and will no doubt be there for thousands of years more.

The dog on the other hand had come to rest for a little while so it’s only for that relatively short time that that particular photograph will be available.

Anyway that’s one or two thoughts on travel photography and perhaps, just to wrap that up just for the moment, at some point I ought to have a look and see what makes what is from one point a very standard picture of the great Sphinx at Giza just a little bit different.

I give one other clue .

As I said on this blog, in the past I used to use medium format equipment based on the Bronica system. And perhaps because of that I have quite a hankering for the square format.

However, shooting square format on a digital SLR greatly reduces the pixel count. Or does it?

Great Sphinx at Giza in Egypt

I hadn’t planned to be away so long. Some delays are planned. I had planned, for example, to look again at the arrangements for my web presence.

This was actually suggested to me by a comment made earlier by Mary who was looking at such things as hosting and domains.

I’ve been on the web for several years now, and it seemed a good idea to me to look again and work out which of my websites I wanted to keep to and which I didn’t, and also of course I’ve changed my system of working from standalone websites to, what are known as content management system approaches.

Maybe later I’ll be looking at how the Internet and computing in general affect the life of a stock photographer.

Another problem I had was that just by accident, I actually deleted one of my databases.

How I did it. I don’t know, lots of us do it. Luckily I had a backup.

What I didn’t take into account was a raging tooth infection, which has kept my dentist occupied with my root canals for some time.

So coming back to the actual meat of the blog, I posted a picture which I think shows what you might call an iconic image.

Almost everybody knows the great Sphinx at Giza so the question is, if you are going to be a travel photographer, is this the kind of picture you should be taking or perhaps something quite different?

One of the great things, of course, about digital photography is that it doesn’t always have to be an either or matter.

I’ll give you an example. Many many years ago, I spent several months in Peru trying to take pictures of all the great sites there.

And I clambered around places like Machu Picchu with my Bronica, with two backs for shooting colour transparency film and black and white.

The main problem was that in Peru in general, and certainly in these isolated circumstances, I had hardly any film.

So when I got to Machu Picchu I think I had about two rolls of colour film and I was fairly certain that they would be very difficult to process in country.

Now this, of course, was a pity for me as it meant I had a very restricted ability to shoot my pictures.

Nowawadays things are quite different.

With a digital camera, you have the possibility of choosing and shooting hundreds of different types of picture and this means that often you can take both the iconic pictures, the pictures that everybody recognizes that you think are so great but which you soon find hundreds of other photographers have taken with similar images, or you can choose to take those pictures which capture the everyday life, and changing times of the people.

I personally find these more interesting.

Now as I’ve been asked a lot about travel photography and as travel photography takes into account a very very wide range of photographic skills, I’ve decided in this blog to devote a number of posts entirely to travel photography now and then.

And perhaps at some stage, and I can put all these posts together and make them into an e book. Let’s wait and see.

For the moment, good shooting and I’ll be there to show the other kind of picture.

Just one small point, although this picture is a fairly standard shot, there is something which is perhaps slightly different about it photographically.

See if you can think what.

I’ll give you a clue:

The mega pixel dimensions of this photo, before I reduced it for the web were 3362 x 3161.

Canon and Tamron Macro lenses extended

In my last post, I said that appearances can be deceptive.

Perhaps that’s something of a mantra in photography.

In this case, I’m talking really about the length of the lens and the focussing systems. And you can now see that the Tamron lens when fully extended is really just as long as the Canon.

This shows one of the most important points about the Canon 100 mm Macro which is that the focussing is internal.

This is important for a number of reasons.

The most important reason is that the length of the lens does not change and the front of the lens does not revolve when you change focus and this gives a number of advantages which I touched on before for my own type in photography.

One of the most important advantages is that I can use a rubber lens hood, and then press my lens against, for example, the wires or glass of a cage and I can focus the lens knowing that it will not get longer or turn round and that there will be no damage to the lens or the cage.

When it comes to the question of the actual work of macro photography, if you look further at the Canon we get to the question that Tony asked about the two settings for focus limiters.

The principle is quite simple.

If the lens has to focus from zero to infinity, the focussing system will have to travel a very long way and take a long time even with Canon’s very quick, ultrasonic motor system.

And of course by this time, the object that you are trying to get into focus may have flown away or crawled out of the frame.

So the idea of the focus limitation is to get an approximate distance that you know that you’re going to be focussing on and to set the focus to that distance.

And then hopefully, the amount of travel that the focus system needs will be much smaller.

This is, of course, a sound idea and will certainly help.

But in practice, I believe as I said before that by far and the best way of dealing with this matter is to switch off the autofocus system altogether and use manual focussing .

The Canon lens, unlike a number of autofocus lenses has got a very large rubber ring for manual focussing and its clearly designed for manual focussing .

However, manual focussing can be best organised in one of two ways.

One is that you can maintain your position and turn the focus ring around.

This of course has some of the same problems as automatic focussing because it will take time.

The other way is simply to set the approximate focus depending on the image magnification you want and then to physically move yourself and the camera backwards and forwards until you get the correct focus.

What is the correct focus? and why are autofocus system likely to fail?

The reason is quite simple.

Most autofocus cameras now have a whole range of focus spots which you can see in the viewfinder.

My Canon cameras, have several focus spots which can be set in different ways. I normally switch off all of them apart from the central one.

It is also possible in some cameras to move the focus spots around but this does take time.

And the main problem with automatic focusing is quite clearly that the lens will only focus accurately if your focus spot is absolutely over the object that you want photograph.

Let’s take a practical example.

Close up of a Fringe Tulip

Here is a photograph of a fringed tulip, a beautiful flower, which I photographed in studio conditions using a flashlight with soft box.

The focussing problems are clear.

If you focus absolutely in the centre of the image what you’ll a sharp background which might be your intention.

Still I wanted to focus mainly on the stamen.

There are obvious problems.

The stamen is not in the centre and therefore a central focus point would miss it.

I could perhaps fool around trying to get the focus point to hover over the right place but in my opinion, it’s much much easier and much better to focus manually.

manual focusing does have one or two problems.

Many modern cameras including my Canons have a mirror based reflex viewing system, rather than the traditional and brighter glass prism.

This means that you do need quite good light to focus accurately and in this case it was provided by the modelling light of my flash.

In brief, in many practical macro photography situations autofocus, even with the help of autofocus limiters. is not the best choice.

So it’s best to use manual focusing.

It’s manual for macro.

Papyrus

Over the last few posts, I’ve put up a few images which are mostly of macro subjects.

By macro I mean, close-ups which are life size or one-to-one at the film plane.

Now there’s a reason for this.

It’s because for sometime, I’ve been meaning to come back and have another look at the Canon 100 mm macro lens, which I bought some time ago.

It’s always, in my view, important to use new equipment when you first have it to get used to its basic features and then try it for sometime in the field.

It’s only after you’ve used it in real photo situations for a while that you understand exactly, what are the good bad strong or weak points for your own photography.

Now, this was also inspired by a comment I received from a photographer in the United States. This is what he wrote to me.

“Just read your review on the Canon 100mm Macro lens 2.8. I just got one and am learning. What is the switch for limit or full on the side for? I noticed over here in the U.S. there are a lot of magazines dealing with digital photography but a majority of them all come from the United Kingdom. Is there any reason that the U.K. appears to be such a contributor to the world of photography in the U.S.?”

Now, I actually live in Bulgaria, so I don’t really follow the UK photo press very well now and I certainly don’t know how it operates in the United States so maybe some readers of this blog could give their comments on this and give us both more information.

So really, I can only respond to Tony’s comments about the performance of the macro lens. I should say right now that I immediately responded to his comments with a brief reply and I also promised that I would give a longer reply here because I think the question of using a macro lens today is a matter of some interest to a lot of photographers.

So, just in case you’re reading this Tony. Hi!

One of the points I touched on before is that the reasons for using macro lenses have changed today.

Recently I visited Egypt and like most people I bought a bunch of souvenirs and when I brought some of them home I thought I would photograph some them.

Among these were some papyrus scrolls and immediately, almost without thinking I decided straightaway to pop them into my desktop scanner.

That shows one of the changes. As I pointed out before there was a time when I would have photographed the scrolls with quite a complicated light set up and making sure that the lens I used had corner to corner sharpness and a flat field.

That is using a lens designed to reproduce a completely flat object in such a way that everything is equally in focus all over the picture.
Now today’s macro lenses are still, in most cases, more or less flat field lenses but the point I’m trying to make is that many many macro shots today perhaps most macro shots have a single point of focus or are not likely to be flat.

If you photograph an insect you want to concentrate on some particularly vital point, usually, the eyes, and everything else around it will go out of focus into a sort of blur so much more important is the way your lens deals with such things as depth of field (DOF), what sort of image is produced by the material that is out of focus.

So, when you take many macro shots, the point of focus is going to be very critical indeed.

And the main point perhaps is that whether you use a focus limiter or whether you try some other way of dealing with the focus spots that you might find in your viewfinder, in practice, the best thing to do is not to use the autofocus system at all.

This comes as quite a surprise to some people who believe that auto anything is always better.

But the fact is that almost all automatic systems are only better than humans in certain situations.

So for example, when you think of autofocus, photographers managed quite well in many cases before autofocus was invented.

This doesn’t mean that automatic systems are useless, simply that they need to be looked at carefully.

Before going further I thought it might be interesting to make a comparison with my old macro lens to see how things have changed.

When I first bought the Canon 100 mm macro lens I felt it was rather bulky, rather large, though not particularly heavy.

I thought it might be an interesting point, to compare it with my old macro lens, which is the now classic Tamron 90 mm lens.

Canon EF 100mm Macro Lens and Tamron 90mm Macro lens

It’s perhaps not directly comparable because the Tamron lens focuses only to half size without an adapter.
I’ve photographed them together but appearances can be deceptive.

So I hope in the next post, to look again at the construction of the Canon 100mm millimetre macro lens, some of its particular points that I found out more about after using it for some time.

And then too, l’ll take another look at taking macro shots today

I think this is going to be my last post on batteries for a while.

As I said, batteries are as boring as backup but batteries are equally essential.

Sometimes, of course, batteries hit the news:

I’ve just read that the United States Administration is banning Nickel Metal Hydride batteries and rechargeable cells on aeroplanes unless they are packed and carried in certain ways as they believe that there is a danger of fire, in particular, from low grade batteries made by companies that perhaps don’t have the highest manufacturing standards.

So that’s something to be concerned about because one of the great joys of digital photography is that you no longer have quite the same problems in going through airports and airport scanners.

The days when you tried to pack your films in lead lined bags, or tried to persuade recalcitrant and overworked airport security staff to let you take your films through in your hand luggage without going through the scanners - those days are gone.

But it seems in these very security conscious times in the travel business, that we now have battery problems.

But back to the batteries themselves as we’re talking about them.

The main problems regarding the types of rechargeable cells that we’ve talked about is that they might have memory problems, sometimes have environmental problems and also that they have a discharge problem: That is that after you charge them they quite quickly lose their power.

Another factor is that if you forget to charge them or wait until the last minute then it’s too late because you can’t immediately charge them even with the quickest chargers.

So, I’m going to come to the last type of cell for the moment which is based on Nickel Metal Hydride technology and is sometimes called a Ready to Use cell.

These types of cells are provided by a few companies and they have the following characteristics.

• When you buy them they are already charged so you can use them straight away

• When you charge them they keep most of their charge for a long time.

My photo show the brands I have used and I have found them to be the best type of cell for photographic purposes.

That’s it for the moment on cells. If you found this post interesting please comment or bookmark.

Next post I’m beginning to respond to previous comments and emails about macro photography so bye till then.