JUST FOR FUN86 DIGITAL CAMERA^ DECEMBER 2019 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
Sometimes you can’t
avoid your own shadow
appearing in the shot –
but you can lose it later
Me and my
shadow
A
ll too often, if you shoot on a bright,
sunny day, the scene is at its best when
the sun is directly behind you. This is
seldom an issue with medium-to-long
focal lengths, but if you use a wide-angle
lens, your own shadow is going to appear in the shot.
For this image, I stood in the water (wellies are an
essential accessory for coastal scenics!) and the
shadow problem was immediately obvious. At eye level,
the horizon cut through the foreground boat, so I used
Live View mode and held the camera as high as possible
overhead to raise it and keep it separate from the boat.
This removed the bulk of the shadow I was casting, but
still left my arms and camera disrupting the boat’s
reflection. Tiptoe in wellies with your arms outstretched
isn’t the most stable of positions for photography, and
both the horizon’s angle and composition suffered in
the process; but I liked the overall idea, so I took the
shot with some Photoshop repair work in mind.
The shadow was a job for the Clone Stamp Tool. In
some ways this tool has been superseded by options
like the Healing Brush, but when you need full manual
control, the Clone Tool is in its element: you simply lift
pixels from one place and paint them in another.
After creating a new layer and setting All Layers
under Sample in the Clone Stamp tool’s Option bar, I Alt-
clicked on the clean edge of the reflection to sample the
pixels, then released Alt and painted over the shadow.
I used several different source points to patch up the
problem, and rebuilt the reflection so it looked natural.
All the cloning work was on a separate layer, so there
was no risk to the original pic if anything went wrong.^1
With the shadow removed, I needed to recompose the
shot to true-up the horizon and lose the dead area on
the right, but I wanted to keep the same 2:3 aspect
ratio and pixel-count as in the original shot. To do this,
I clicked down on the regular Crop Tool, and selected
the Perspective Crop Tool in its place. In the Options
bar, I clicked the Front Image button to set the pixel
dimensions of the crop, then dragged the marquee over
the image, cropping out the dead area. To straighten
the horizon, I dragged the top-right corner down so the
guidelines followed the sloping horizon in the image.
The result was a flat horizon, a better composed
picture, and no trace of that annoying shadow.^21
2
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