Photo Friday: Two Be One

When I lived in South Korea, I used to join my ex-pat buddies every Friday night at a pub called ToBeOne. It was a bit of a dive, but the music was good and the beer was cheap, and every once and a while, there was local live music, including some of the talented ex-pats.

One night, one of my friends even let me sing with his band (I think it was a sympathy gesture because I helped come up with the name of the band, which, if you want to know about, you'll have to wait for the sequel to my novel).

But I digress. Actually, I haven't even really gotten to the point of this post, so here we go...

Last weekend, I took part in the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk, which took a large gang of photogs through the Byward Market, up Wellington Street to Parliament Hill, along Wellington to and across the Portage Bridge, along the Voyageur path to the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and across the Alexandra Bridge, back to the Byward Market. It was a perfect autumn day, and I took scads of photos (which I'm still going through: you might have seen some for Wordless Wednesday).

I took lots of pictures of people, including some of the folks who live on the streets and others who perform. Most of the pictures were candid, but some people saw that I was focused on them and rolled with it.

One street performer saw me shooting, and smiled as I took the shot. It wasn't a bad shot, but unfortunately, someone had just entered my frame as I shot, and I thought I would have to discard the photo.

As shot: someone walked into my frame.

And then I thought, why don't I just take the unwanted person out of the shot?

I've never done this before, so the result still isn't great. For those of you who don't know how to do it, here's what I did: using a photo-merge feature in my photo-editing software, I took two photos that looked like they aligned and let the software line them up.

Second shot: not bad, but the first one was better.

I then painted over the unwanted person in the "keeper" shot and the performer in the other photo, and processed the two. This is what I got:

I did some further adjustments, but didn't quite blend the background. It looks like there's a shadow to the left of the shot. But at least I got rid of the major distraction.

What do you think?

I hope to practice this technique with other photos and maybe come up with some special effects.

Happy Friday!