Photoshop Tip Of The Month: Move It On Over

Nature and people are my primary photographic subjects. While I love to make images of many others, it’s these two that prompted me to adopt the focus of this month’s tutorial. When I photograph people, communication allows me to reposition them so their arrangement makes a nice composition. But if I’m doing street photography, or if I don’t know my subjects, or if I’m traveling, I don’t have the luxury to readily move person A to spot A, person B to spot B, person C to spot C, etc. Wildlife is even tougher as I’m at the mercy of where the animal wanders. While I often find myself “willing” it to a given location, it doesn’t always occur. Knowing the potential of what each shot could have been, I always pressed the shutter just to have a record of the only if encounter. Only if it would have walked into the light, only if the two animals were a bit closer, only if it moved away from the bush………… Maybe it was fate, but I’m glad I pressed the shutter back then and I now continue to press it on a regular basis and perform a bit of Photoshop magic to get the effect that “could have been” if the animal did what I wanted.

 Mount Evans is a world class destination to photograph mountain goats and other species of wildlife. I’m lucky to live an hour and a half away from this great location so I try to get up to the summit a few times a year to capture the goats. At 14,000 feet, the wind is hardly ever calm. Near the summit is a small tarn. In all the trips I’ve made to photograph the wildlife, it’s rare to see it still. Compounded with this rarity is the few times I’ve seen it still, no animals ever showed up. Well serendipity occurred one morning this year and just about every piece fell into place. The one part that didn’t materialize was the two goats never got close enough to the water. I was hoping for less scree between them and their reflection. Hence, this month’s Photoshop Tip of the Month.