This shot was taken in the heart of Rome, Italy. I was standing in a small park across the street from Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland). No matter what time of day you’re standing in front of it, the view will pretty much always have cars, buses, scooters, and tourists right in front of it. Using Photoshop to clone all those cars and buses out of the way would be a nightmare, because you’d have to rebuild a lot of the front of the building. So, instead, try this: get down really low. This totally changes your perspective and field of view, and uses the foreground grass to hide distracting stuff like cars and buses. It took me a few shots, and using Live View to check my positioning, to get it right, but that’s okay—the film is free, right?

By the way, you can use this same trick shooting your kid’s sporting events to hide the outfield fence on a baseball field, or the empty stands on a soccer field, or to hide anything in your line of sight when standing. For travel photography, I’m generally a “one body, one lens” guy. My go-to full-frame lens for travel now is a 28–300mm f/3.5–6.3 (see page 153 for more on this). In the final image, I’m zoomed out wide at 35mm, and I’m at f/6.3 at a shutter speed of 1/100 of a second (it was kind of overcast). My ISO was at 100. For post-processing, I added some contrast and sharpening, and used the Shadows slider to open up the shadows in the building a bit (just drag it to the right in either Lightroom’s Develop module or in Camera Raw). While this makes for a good example, it doesn’t make a really great shot, especially with that scaffolding on the left side of the building. Want to see how to get rid of stuff like that? Watch the video I made to show you how on the book’s companion webpage.

 

Excerpted from The Best of The Digital Photography Book Series: The step-by-step secrets for how to make your photos look like the pros’!  by Scott Kelby