File:Always look on the bright side (of the fountain) - Flickr - tauntingpanda.jpg

This is another composite shot. I set up my tripod on the bridge overlooking the fountain and took about 40 shots over the course of about ten minutes. (this was the easy part :-) Then I picked the shot with the least people in it for my base layer, and went through my other shots looking for 'blank' spots to cover up the people on my base layer. i cut those out and pasted them onto the base, making a blank fountain with nobody. Then I went through the 40 shots and cut out all the people (and their shadows) that were on the right side of the fountain (in the sun) and pasted them into the composite. Ok, not all of them, i just started putting people into the composite, and then I would go through the other plate photos and look for people in the areas that needed more crowds. I probably ended up with twice as many people as i needed, and many of them were in the same physical space, and it looked strange, so i took them back out. I had about a trillion layers in photoshop, but by keeping all the people on separate layers it was easier to make sure that the overlaps went the right way. Then i desaturated the base layer and left the people in color.