Me and my shadow

Sometimes you can’t avoid your own shadow appearing in the shot – but you can lose it later

All too often, if you shoot on a bright, sunny day, the scene is at its best when the sun is directly behind you. This is seldom an issue with medium-to-long focal lengths, but if you use a wide-angle lens, your own shadow is going to appear in the shot.

For this image, I stood in the water (wellies are an essential accessory for coastal scenics!) and the shadow problem was immediately obvious. At eye level, the horizon cut through the foreground boat, so I used Live View mode and held the camera as high as possible overhead to raise it and keep it separate from the boat. This removed the bulk of the shadow I was casting, but still left my arms and camera disrupting the boat’s reflection. Tiptoe in wellies with your arms outstretched isn’t the most stable of positions for photography, and both the horizon’s angle and composition suffered in the process; but I liked the overall idea, so I took the shot with some Photoshop repair work in mind.

The shadow was a job for the Clone Stamp Tool. In some ways this tool has been superseded by options like the Healing Brush, but when you need full manual control, the Clone Tool is in its element: you simply lift pixels from one place and paint them in another.

After creating a new layer and setting All Layers under Sample in the Clone Stamp tool’s Option bar, I Altclicked on the clean edge of the reflection to sample the pixels, then released Alt and painted over the shadow. I used several different source points to patch up the problem, and rebuilt the reflection so it looked natural. All the cloning work was on a separate layer, so there was no risk to the original pic if anything went wrong.

With the shadow removed, I needed to recompose the shot to true-up the horizon and lose the dead area on the right, but I wanted to keep the same 2:3 aspect ratio and pixel-count as in the original shot. To do this, I clicked down on the regular Crop Tool, and selected the Perspective Crop Tool in its place. In the Options bar, I clicked the Front Image button to set the pixel dimensions of the crop, then dragged the marquee over the image, cropping out the dead area. To straighten the horizon, I dragged the top-right corner down so the guidelines followed the sloping horizon in the image. The result was a flat horizon, a better composed picture, and no trace of that annoying shadow.