VANISHING ACT

Mike Harris demonstrates a cunning trick to help you remove the crowds when shooting popular and busy locations

- Mike Harris

If you're shooting a popular Location after hours you might have to share the space with a fellow photographer or two, but with a little common sense it's not difficult to work around each other.

However, visit a popular location in the middle of the day and you'll often have to contend with crowds of sightseers.

If you're intent on capturing a people-free photo of a scene you have two options: wait and hope for a lull in the flow of visitors, or remove each and every offender in post. The former is preferable if you're happy to wait, but during the hour we spent at Glastonbury Tor in south-west England the flow of visitors never let up.

The obvious remedy in post is to use Photoshop's Clone Stamp or Healing Brush to sample existing parts of the image to cover up the unwanted figures. This method is most effective if a figure partially obscures a linear section of the scene, such as a brick wall or bush, as the repetitive nature of these textures allow them to be cloned with relative success. However, if the figure partially obscures something unique, like a statue or a spindly tree, such objects are much more difficult to replicate.

In this project we're going to show you a neat way to get around this by shooting a sequence of identically framed photos while crowds continue to move. If in one image a person is captured passing in front of a feature and in the second image that person has moved, leaving the feature clear, you can use layer masks to reveal the unobstructed feature.