[cuilin]

i visited the udvar-hazy museum a few years ago, it's one of the two aerospace smithsonian museums in washington d.c., so naturally it was packed full of people. the shot below is just how i envisioned it, perhaps with a few people milling around, except on that particular day it wasn't happening. there were at least 100 people in every shot i took. so i kept as still as possible, pretty difficult on a hanging catwalk that bounced along with the people walking past me.



in the end i grabbed about 80 shots using the same exposure and focus. handheld so it was framed as close as i could get it, but not perfect. i processed those shots in lightroom, did the first one to taste and sync'd the settings to the rest. loaded them all in photoshop into a stack of layers and had photoshop align them by content. starting with the first layer i masked out the humans and moved on to do the same with the second layer, then third and so on until there was nobody left. the end result is made up of about 30 layers. there is one guy in the bottom right, but he was an employee and in every shot. i don't mind him being there, he's pretty well hidden.

[cuilin]

couldn't figure out how to edit so i'll add this here.. this works well for this kind of shot, in other words, i was looking down on them as opposed to looking through the crowd and as the people moved throughout the series i was able to shoot little sections of the background. so it'll never work somewhere like a concert or other place where when someone moves all you can see is the people behind them. you have to be able to get a clear view of the entire background over the course of the photo series.

[EdMak]

Time Factor, to edit? Ed.

[cuilin]

this was a while back so i couldn't tell you specifically how much time it took to edit the photos. lightroom didn't take any extra time, i just processed one image and turned the sync on. in photoshop i'd estimate an hour, but your time may vary based on the type of image, number of layers you have to stock, number of layers you have to mask and and how fast your computer is to process all of this.

[EnglishBob]

In Photoshop you can do the same thing, you take multiple exposures and then have it automaically blend them.... very little work involved.

Nicely done here though.

[cuilin]

In Photoshop you can do the same thing, you take multiple exposures and then have it automaically blend them.... very little work involved.

Nicely done here though.

i did that first, but because some of the groups of people stood still for a lot of the shots they were in the final. so i did the same process by hand.

[Phil J]

Blooming heck Beth, that is one (or series of) hell of a shot!! . I'd love to see a big print of it, something like A2 or larger. That print should by rights be hanging in the entrance to the originating factory and/or in the entrance hall of the museum.

It has been very well done by you. You rightly ought to be very proud of that one.

Regards.

Phil.