If you have not noticed it yet, I really like Kickstarter. One can find so many new and interesting stuff there. Always. And when one actually understands that it’s not an online store, it can be a lot of enjoyment seeing on how projects unfold.

But why I mention it today? It’s because I received a reward from one of my recently backed projects, Blilps.

What are Blips?

Blips are small microscopic lenses that you stick on the back of you smartphone, to radically change the magnification level you are getting. There are three lenses, a macro, micro and ultra, each one with different magnification. I got only the first two, as ultra was added later, and I did not change my pledge.

How to use them?

The lenses come in a tiny package, with few instructions. Not that you need anything more. To use the lens, you just unstick it from the package and stick it onto the phone camera. Hard to say how many times you can stick and unstick them, but the maybe 20 times I tried it worked fine. They held fine when directly on the phone, but on phone with a skin applied they tended to get loose.

There is a special camera app from the manufacturer, but you don’t really need it. The one thing that it does is to allow to lock focus, but you can get the exact same thing by just using manual focus in any other photo app.

So the best way to focus is not to use autofocus, but to lock the focus at one distance and then just move closer or further with the phone, until you get the focus you want. I personally had quite problems with this, as my hands just shake too much, and with such shallow DOF it’s easy to just move the phone by a tiny bit and loose the focus. Doing this from a holder or a small tripod would result in much better results. Also using a burst mode can help, as the phone takes many photos quickly, so you get shots with different planes of focus.

Macro & Micro

The focus distance for the macro lens is 10-12mm and micro is 6mm. That really is close. Depending on the camera position on your phone, it can result that you are shading your own subject.

Here are some of my results. All show a normal photo (around 10cm from the subject), a photo with the macro lens attached, and a photo with the micro lens attached.

I need to experiment more with them, trying to get better results (and I usually don’t shoot macro :)), and if I get some good ones, you will see them on this blog.

Overall

Blips are an interesting product. I don’t think the goal here is to get a pro level macro shots, but more about having fun with a new stile of photography, without having to buy a very pricey macro lens. You can find out more about blips on the Smartmicrooptics website.

Some time ago I wrote about how to avoid people in your photos (you can check the post here), and today I thought I will show you an example of one of the techniques I mentioned here. So today I will show you how to remove people from your photos manually, using multiple exposures.

1. Taking the photos

It’s hard to say how many photos you will need. It depends a lot on the area you are trying to photograph. If the area is filled with a stream of moving people no amount of photos will be enough. But if the amount of people is more moderate, and you can see the parts of the scene you want to photograph, you can do it.

The best tactic is to first take a shot and check it, trying to remember the spots that contain people. Then without changing the camera settings or composition, wait until one of those spots is empty, and take another shot. Wait for another spot, and take another shot. Continue doing so, until you have a photo with empty space for every spot you need. Having more photos than less is usually much better.

Let’s look at an example I took in Lyon, France. The Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière has quite many people going in and out during the day. At night it was easy to avoid them, but during the day, I had to do more work. I set up for a vertorama, and while a single exposure for the top image was enough (no people there :)) I had to do multiple for the bottom. For this, I took quite a lot, 18 shots in total, just to be sure I have everything.

In the end I used only 5 of these shots, just the ones I needed for the whole image. Here I had a bit of luck that all people were moving. If there are some just standing around or sitting, you may need to retouch them out in the end.

2. Blending them

So once the photos are selected, we have to load them all into layers in Photoshop. Here using the masks one can easily blend in parts of every image, to remove the people.

Let’s look again at the example. Here, you may notice I also loaded the combined vertorama (the top combined with one of the bottom images, that had the least people) as the base. This does not change much, just one has to make sure the photos are properly aligned. Other than that, it’s the same process as by a normal image. If you don’t know how to load files into layers in Photoshop, check this guide on how to do it.

The next step is to add a black layer mask (a mask that hides everything). Either choose a layer and go to Layer/Layer Mask/Hide all or hold down Alt and click on the Add layer mask button (circle inside a square in the bottom right of layers window). Once you have all the layers except the first one hidden you can continue.

Now choose a white brush, 100% opacity, 0% hardness, with a size around 100px (depends on the size of your photo). No we can start to remove people. Just choose one area you want to work with on the base photo, look through the other layers (holding down shift and clicking on the mask will temporary disable it, so you can see the photo), where the are is empty, and then start painting with white on that layers mask, over the part you want to hide. Don’t forget, that people also have reflections and shadows, so you have to remove those also.

Continue doing this for every area you need, until you have a completely empty photo (that is if you had enough source images :))

And thats all for this guide, for more, feel free to check out the guides category of the blog.

When you think about Paris, you really don’t think about the modern parts. It’s really hard to associate modern skyscrapers with Paris. Just so strange :)

This is a three shots vertorama, taken in the La Defense district in Paris. Shot edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.