I set out early in the morning to get some photos of Prague’s main tourist sites, the Old Town Square and the Charles Bridge, without hordes of tourists blocking my view. There’s a few ways to create images without people in them. Of course, the best is to take an image when there’s no-one there. Another method is to set a long shutter speed so that any people moving through the scene will not register in the final image. This requires two things. Firstly, the people crossing through the frame need to keep moving enough that you won’t end up with a ghosted image of them. Secondly, you either need low enough light levels or a dark enough filter to use a long enough exposure.
Neither of the above methods worked for me in taking this picture. I was there early, but not early enough. On top of this people like to stop on Charles Bridge and I didn’t have a dark enough ND filter to really extend my shutter speeds to block them out. As a result I set about working on a post processing technique. I took a bunch of pictures so that I could blend them together and end up with a people-free Charles Bridge. Then, this little girl walking with her parents suddenly took off running and stopped at this little plaque. I decided this made for a nice image and decided to keep her in the photo. Once I got home I decided I’d actually have liked to show the various stages of her approach. Unfortunately, I hadn’t taken enough images to make this work. I’ve seen an intriguing e-book called “Photographing the Fourth Dimension – Time” . It’s available at Flatbooks which is run by Trey Ratcliffe of Stuck In Customs. The photographers he works with in producing these books are always interesting and informative. I’m planning on buying this book and giving it a read as the concept sounds intriguing to me. Also, the next time someone starts moving through a scene in an interesting way I’ll make sure I keep the shutter firing.
