Over the Fourth of July weekend, we took a brief family vacation to the beach. Most of the time when you go to the beach you have to worry about the massive crowds…and trying to avoid the other beach go-ers from getting into your family photos.
In this tutorial, I want to show you that it is possible to capture photos without everyone and their brother in your shots.
The key is to time it just right…to find those moments when a group of people have gone back to the tent to get a drink or reapply suntan lotion.
Another helpful suggestion is to change your position to avoid people in the background. Sometimes that means, moving a little to the left or right. Or getting down low.
Finally, realizing that sometimes it is unavoidable, there are helpful tools in Lightroom and Photoshop to easily clone them out. I’m not the best cloner…so I try to get it close while I’m there.
Here are a couple before-and-after from our recent trip.
Just to prove it was Fourth of July and there were people on the beach…here is the view from our tent.
My son was trying a boogie board for the first time. I did take several of photographs as he was riding the wave in but I used the one where he had the most space in between the people to edit.
straight out of the camera (sooc):
edit:
[divider_flat] Here was a moment where my daughter and mother-in-law was building sandcastles.
You will see in this one…I happened to get lucky, there were fewer people on this side of the beach at the particular moment. There were probably more swimmers to the right, but I used my in-camera crop to minimize those…so I only had to crop out one other family.
sooc:
edited:
Finally, my daughter and her yellow hat. This one had the most cloning of people and I ended up leaving the people way off in the distance.
sooc:
edited:
[divider_flat] Stayed tuned…Tomorrow I’ll show you how I transformed some of my photos into layouts for my family photo book!
