Ugo Cei is a passionate landscape photographer from Italy who uses the Fujifilm X-E2. He loves to travel, revealing the beauty of the planet and its people through his photographs in the process. He is also one of the founders of Mediterranean Photo Tours where he offers photography workshops in the most beautiful locations of the Mediterranean.
Ugo is very active on social media and his personal blog where he shares various tips, tricks and essays related to photography. What’s more, he is a contributor at Visual Wilderness, one of the most popular websites dedicated to landscape and travel photography.
One of his latest posts grabbed our attention, as it is a topic that interests us as well.
In a three part series, Ugo explains why the human presence in a landscape photograph is not necessarily a negative thing. He states that it has become increasingly difficult to visit popular locations without the presence of tourists, so it is often better to incorporate them then try to eliminate them. To quote Ugo’s post:
When confronted with a photograph of a landscape that contains some people in it, the temptation to use the healing brush or the content-aware fill tools is strong. However, we should always ask ourselves whether the human presence adds or subtracts from the composition… What kind of feeling or atmosphere do we want to convey to the viewer?
What is interesting is that he shares various examples to explain why in certain situations he felt the need to remove certain people and why he didn’t on other occasions. In the third part, Ugo meditates on when to avoid the human presence altogether and when to leave the people in the composition.
In my case, the deciding factor is almost always the relationship between the people and the landscape. The question I ask myself is whether there is such a relationship and whether such a relationship adds or subtracts from the image.
As a side note, Ugo produced a helpful video tutorial where he explains how to get rid of tourist with Photoshop if you feel his or her presence is detracting from your image.
