It's often been said that the background is just as important as the foreground. It's really true! But this statement usually refers to compositions in which the subject is in the foreground, while the background is potentially distracting.
But what happens when your subject is way off in the distance, and it's the foreground that's the visual culprit? At BetterPhoto.com, Jim Zuckerman often comes to the rescue with great solutions. Check out his excellent photos and ideas:
(c) Jim Zuckerman
This picture of the St. Louis skyline, points out Jim Z, "was taken from an elevated platform. Between my vantage point and the Mississippi River were a lot of ugly structures that looked terrible as a foreground. I used the Photoshop plug-in Flood made by flamingpear.com to completely eliminate the industrial junk that visually polluted my shot. It made a realistic watery reflection, and the great thing about using this filter in this particular situation is that everyone knows the river belongs here. The digital reflection looks better than the real reflection, and it served the double purpose of cleaning up the foreground."
(c) Jim Zuckerman
For the photo above, says Jim: "I did the same thing in the night shot of a giraffe drinking in Namibia. The animal was drinking from a narrow stream, but there were all kinds of distracting vegetation in the foreground. Flood eliminated the unwanted foreground elements and the water was actually there — but not this much of it."
Notes from BetterPhoto.com:
- Jim Zuckerman is a top stock photographer and published author who teaches many excellent online photography courses at BetterPhoto.com, including Creative Techniques in Photoshop , Advanced Creative Techniques in Photoshop and Photoshop: Thinking Outside the Box.
- A new book will be published this October - by Jim Miotke and Kerry Drager! Check it out: The BetterPhoto Guide to Creative Digital Photography - Learn to Master Composition, Color, and Design
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