Vacation Photography — Remove All Those Tourists — Well, maybe

Some say that HDR, or high-dynamic range, is a great way to remove tourists from our photos taken in busy vacation locations. Well, maybe sometimes.

First some explanations. HDR is high-dynamic range photography. Our eye sees 22-stops of light but the camera can capture about 5-stops. HDR images allow us to photograph details in the shadows while still maintaining details in the highlights.

To create a HDR photo, we take 2 or more photos from the same location and vary the exposure. The examples below have been created from seven photos. The exposures range from balanced light meter to -3-stops all the way to +3-stops.

HDR software has an option to deghost or remove people. Deghosting removes people from the final photo if those people didn’t appear in the same spot in all the photos. There’s usually a scale so we can vary the intensity of deghosting. I’ve set the deghosting to maximum on each image.

You see that people are still in my photo of the busy street in San Gimignano, Italy. The only person who stood still through all seven photos was the man in the gray windbreaker on the left. Everyone else moved. The lady in the orange coat walked straight at the camera through all seven photos. The man with the umbrella walked across the scene from right to left.

In conclusion, the crowded street is still crowded with people. The different software, though, handled processing in a variety of ways.