Few days ago, while cleaning the house I found a camera tripod which was left by the previous occupant. The uninterrupted rain kept me inside the house over the weekend. There I was with an idle mind and plenty of time to kill. And I decided to kill myself along with the time. Few clicks on the camera and few more on the computer resulted in these photos –
What I had –
A camera and not so sturdy tripod
Plenty of time
Theotrical knowledge on post-processing for cloning & layers
Some of the key points which makes it easy/simple to get the final cloned photo (Or in other words my learnings/observations from this time-kill experiment) –
Once camera is fixed on the tripod, be careful not to move the setup between the photos. That saves some effort in re-aligning them in different layers during processing.
Shoot in manual mode to have same exposures in all the photos.
Having a fixed light (shooting indoors for example) is better.
Have less clutter in the frame. And make sure to not to move other objects with in the frame unless required – leads to more effort during processing.
Once camera is set-up and focused, shift to manual focus mode. This is helpful if you are using a shallow DOF lens.
If its your first attempt, make sure you are not overlapping the objects/person you are plannign to clone. If you are noob like me when it comes to procesisng, you’ll have a tough time. Once you get hang of the processing raise the bar.
Use remote to shoot if you are alone, you get control on the time. If you don’t have one, try tethering your camera. Shoot from your laptop/PC. At then end – you have timer mode or ask your friend to shoot you.
(Optional, but helpful) Be creative. Don’t you think, looking at same you sitting in different places/positions is bit boring. 🙂
On all the three photos above, one can easily makeout the shoddy work that I’ve put in merging the images. Time to work on the processing skills and raise the bar. 🙂