Creating mood with black and white

Hola amigos,

today I am going to talk about my explorations when post processing photos.

I took this one in Mexico in Monte Alban near Oaxaca. These ruins are really impressive but unfortunately I could not get there under perfect lighting conditions.

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Since it was june and this is the rainy season, I got a lot of clouds. It's not necessary a bad thing as I immediatly thought it would look good in black and white.

Now black and white can mean many things, there are a lot of possibilities with it.

Here are 2 of my favorites conversations for this one. (click on the picture to see them bigger)

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One is very contrasty, the other one is smoother and a bit moodier.

Converting to black and white is not just about removing color, it gives you the occasion to either go really high contrast or smoother, highlight different areas of the pictures and give an overall different feeling from the original one.

I tend to use Silver Efex Pro from Google to convert to black and white as it gives me a good starting point with their very good presets.

Which one do you like best? moody or contrasty? or color maybe?

Let me know in the comments, it's always good to see people's opinion.

Jeremy

The other way to remove tourists from your shots

Hey guys,

As promised here is the other way (actually one other way there are others) to removed undesired tourists from your vacation shots.

For that you are going to have to use a bit of photoshop.

I am not going to go to much into the details as you can learn more about it here (the video is very interesting but if you want to see just the part about tourist removal you can jump to 49 min)

But the idea is to take a series of shot without moving, waiting for tourists to move like this

Then open the photos as layers in photoshop (meaning they are on top of each other), auto align them and then mask away the tourists using the clean portions of each layer.

In the end you get something like this:

The secret to this is simple, the more you wait the easier your job will be.

So next time you are on vacation somewhere, be patient and take multiple shots of places ! You'll end up with the perfect "tourist free" shot!

Jeremy

They key to travel photography: getting rid of tourists!

Hello everyone,

today I am going to share a little tip with you. You know what separates a good monument photo from a snapshot that anybody can take? Tourists!

Generally the photos that poeple love from famous locations appear almost toursit free... which of course is either very (very very...) difficult or even impossible.

So what can you do?

In this post I am going to share the easy tip, in the next one we'll go over a more complex one.

So today's easy tip is, find an angle that hides the tourists:

The reason I took this photo from a low angle and with a cactus as foreground element is not only for composition, there was tourists all over the place in front of this Church in Oaxaca (Mexico). By placing my camera carefully I was able to get rid of all of them, no photoshop involved!

So next time you are trying to shoot a crowded place try to look for interesting objects to hide the unwanted tourists.

Next up, removing tourists when there is no object to hide them, stay tuned!

Jeremy

Back from our holiday in colorful Mexico

Hey guys,

I haven't been posting for a while, my wife and I were visiting Mexico for 10 days for a friend's wedding. 

As usual when we travel, I packed up the camera and grabbed a few shots, I'll be sharing them in the next few days.

This first shot was taken in the streets of San Pedro Cholula near to Puebla. From the 3 cities we visited (Mexico City, Puebla and Cholula), Cholula is definitely the one we liked most. It's cute and colorful and you can see birght vibrant walls like this at almost every corner.

Stay tuned for more photos from Mexico

Jeremy