10 ways to deemphasize people in photos.
Sometimes a project will require not showcasing people. This recent project for Showdog Brand Handlers was to create a series of warehouse facility and technology photos to be used as art pieces for the new Geodis office in Brentwood. One of the goals was to deemphasize specific people in the photos to give the images a longer life and also put focus on the facilities and technology.
I absolutely love photographing people. People give photos life and emotion, and they are often essential with scenes showing equipment or processes in action. I needed to think of several ways to fight my inclination to make the people the stars of the photos. I needed to be ready with multiple solutions, especially since we were creating so many images in this multi-day, multi-location shoot with people in a majority of the scenes.
Here are 10 of the techniques we used to deemphasize people in the photos. Hopefully these will help you next time you’re working with a photographer on location.
1. Don’t show people at all
Simple enough, except a forklift can’t drive itself.
2. Turn people away from the camera
Show their backs or sides.
3. Hands or feet
Hands at work can tell a great story and still be anonymous.
4. Crop out faces
Frame the body but not the face.
5. Hide faces behind equipment
Obscure someone’s face behind equipment or products as they work.
6. Motion blur
With longer exposures, people become blurred and unrecognizable as they move while the rest of the scene is still.
7. Silhouettes
Use selective lighting to turn people into dark silhouettes.
8. Selective Focus
Have the people out of focus by using shallow depth of field and focusing on other things in the scene.
9. Make people small in relation to the rest of the scene
A tiny person next to a mountain helps give the mountain a sense of scale.
10. Interact with each other instead of the camera
The emotion comes from the watched interaction rather than feeling like the subjects are looking straight at the viewer.