Eliminating foreground objects by moving the camera, is it feasible?

sirch

sirch

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I have seen an interesting looking tree that I would like to take a photo of. The part of the tree that I want to photograph is pretty much horizontal (lying down, on its side) and can only be photographed from one side. The problem is that there is a smaller tree in front of it that rather ruins the shot and the smaller tree is, I think, too large to clone out and I am not that good at cloning anyway. So I was thinking of taking two (or more) shots from different positions and then merging them so that the foreground tree is removed.


Perhaps an easier way of explaining this is to imagine you are photographing a shop front but there is a lamppost between you and the shop and you want to get rid of the lamppost. By taking one photo and then moving to one side and taking another the lamppost will be in a different position in each photo and so by merging the lamppost can be eliminated.


The question is, is this possible or sensible? I am concerned that distortion caused by changing the camera position will mean that the images won’t merge exactly. Is it better to keep the camera parallel to the subject when moved or is it better to keep the lens pointing at a single point and move the camera in an arc about that point?
 
I think you'll still get parallax distortion or at least there will be something visibly "odd" about the shot.

But give it a go. Then you'll know for sure.
 
What you are suggesting is the way that they do frozen shots in movies and then rotate them. Say someone does a ninja jump, freezes in mid-air and you then have this view of being able to look around them, say 180 degrees in a couple of seconds. They do this by having a ring of individual cameras which all fire off and capture a still image at the critical (mid-air) point. These stills are then assembled frame by frame to produce this effect.
The reason I mention this, is that it kind of replicates what you are thinking of doing, just on a grander scale. Unfortunately, what it also suggests, is that each camera captures a different angle of view which is quite different to the other cameras. My thought is therefore that it would be nigh on impossible to bring 2 shots together with enough quality to remove your foreground object. However, I have been known to be wrong, and sometimes quite regularly! It might be fun trying though and you might discover something else.
 
I like this challenge.
Have you seen recent documentaries where they want to liven up an old photograph of a person, so they crop them out from the background and have a moving camera position. So the person appears to be some distance in front of the photo?
 
GreenNinja67 said:
I think you'll still get parallax distortion or at least there will be something visibly "odd" about the shot.

But give it a go. Then you'll know for sure.
Click to expand...

Thanks I almost certainly will, I was trying to decide how best to move the camera to give me the best chance


RaphaelSamad said:
What you are suggesting is the way that they do frozen shots in movies and then rotate them. Say someone does a ninja jump, freezes in mid-air and you then have this view of being able to look around them, say 180 degrees in a couple of seconds. They do this by having a ring of individual cameras which all fire off and capture a still image at the critical (mid-air) point. These stills are then assembled frame by frame to produce this effect.
The reason I mention this, is that it kind of replicates what you are thinking of doing, just on a grander scale. Unfortunately, what it also suggests, is that each camera captures a different angle of view which is quite different to the other cameras. My thought is therefore that it would be nigh on impossible to bring 2 shots together with enough quality to remove your foreground object. However, I have been known to be wrong, and sometimes quite regularly! It might be fun trying though and you might discover something else.
Click to expand...

Thanks, you are probably right but I guess those cameras are in a ring, may be the effect will be reduced if the camera moves in a line parallel to the subject


ianp5a said:
I like this challenge.
Have you seen recent documentaries where they want to liven up an old photograph of a person, so they crop them out from the background and have a moving camera position. So the person appears to be some distance in front of the photo?
Click to expand...

Haven't see that effect, however it does give me an idea, I don't need to merge the whole image just crop out and overlay the part with the foreground tree may be enough.
 
Yes, if you're not in a hurry, cloning can be quite satisfying. Especially if you have the real thing as the source.
 
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FWIW I tried this idea and in case anyone comes across this thread in the future I thought I'd add an update. The upshot is it wasn't very successful.

On revisiting the location it was fairly obvious that the subject would have needed quite a lot of PP to make anything of it and I am not really into heavy PP. Anyway I took a few shots to try the parallax idea but the small tree was really too close to the subject which meant having to move the camera quite a long way. This being trees nothing was straight or flat so a large movement of the camera meant that foreground and background objects were too displaced to align, even with skew/rotate. In my lamppost-in-front-of-a-shop example above it may work if the lamppost is sufficiently far in front of the shop and the shop fills the frame. However in that case cloning may be easier.
 
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