The obvious thing to do would be to go to less popular places where there aren’t as many tourists around.
This may very well result in some of the best landscape images of your life. But if you absolutely need to take a picture of a popular destination, there are still a lot of things you can do.
Choose the Month Strategically
I know that getting vacation days outside the normal holidays might not be possible for everyone, and some locations are definitely best to visit during certain times of the year. But, visiting during low-season is the best method to avoid the crowds.
If you want to photograph events such as the Tulip Festival in the PSNW (Washington/Oregon), or the Cherry Blossom in Japan, you have to visit during a specific time of the year, and most likely it’s going to be crowded with both photographers and tourists. However, if you’re not photographing a specific event, visiting during low season can be a great choice. Not only will you avoid the biggest crowds, you may also be rewarded with some unique scenery and weather.
Wake Up Early
Since many tourists aren’t dedicated photographers, most of them won’t be awake and out in nature for sunrise. Normally they prefer spending a couple extra hours in bed and having breakfast at the hotel.
This is a great advantage for us who wish to capture the beautiful landscapes in optimal light. It’s rare that you meet large crowds this early in the morning, but you may meet a fellow photographer or two. Usually most photographers, and non-photographers, that are up for sunrise try not to get in each other’s way.
About one or two hours after sunrise, depending on what time of the year it is, the first busses filled with tourists begin to arrive. This gives you a lot of time to enjoy these places, and take the images that will be difficult to capture when it gets annoyingly crowded.
Stack Multiple Images
Stacking multiple images is another method to remove crowds from your pictures. This is a little more advanced than using an ND Filter, and requires that you have an image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. Let’s do this step by step:
- Take a set of images from the exact same position. Ideally you should use a tripod so that the frame is the same on each image. Try to take 20-25 images with an interval of roughly 20 seconds. Having this interval will allow people to move a little between each shot.
- Import the images to your computer.
- Open Photoshop
- Click File > Scripts > Statistics
- Choose Median as your Stack Mode in the box that appears, and check the box for “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images”.
- Go to YouTube and watch funny videos until Photoshop is done processing…
- When the image is done, zoom in to 100% and look for any spots where the script wasn’t able to do a perfect job. If you find such spots select the Spot Removal Tool and carefully heal these places.
This is a great technique to remove people from your images. My experience is that the script works well on 99% of images, and even on the remaining 1% it does a decent job.
Read the full article over at Digital Photography School.
Source: Digital Photography School
