When I travel, I love to take photographs, and not just quick snaps, I love to be creative.

Unfortunately I do tend to create a huge backlog of work that needs processing, ie. I have a blog post that has been a work in progress for at least 2 years from our trip to St Louis Arboretum. I'll get to it someday.

But anyway, the bane for all of us, especially when in a public space is the inevitable "photobomb". I don't mind when its accidental, these things happen, but I get annoyed when someone sees what you are doing and then still proceeds to photobomb. Actually the worse time was in the UK (ironic since that is where I am from). You see, us Brits have a habit of apologising to the extent that it really should be a national sport - however what is annoying is that they will say "sorry" for a photobomb BEFORE THEY DO IT!

ARGH!!!

Anyway, enough of the ranting.

Sometimes a photobomb not only 'works', but actually will add to the photo. 

During Labor day weekend, we travelled to the Monterrey Peninsula in California to try and escape the Texas heat and I decided to do some “sunset” photography at a nice rocky part of the coastline. From that shoot, this is one of my favourite photos – the kid (totally random) leaping across the rocks just completes the shot!

And now for the confession!

This photo is not what it would appear to be – it is a fake! Well not totally a fake, what happened was that I got a couple of photographs with this boy in the frame, one of which he looked perfect, but the sea was calm in the background; while another showed the waves breaking on the rocks in the background, but he had changed positions and was not as interesting.

So I did the only thing a photography can do in this situation, bring the best of both photos together. For comparison, here are the original two photographs (un-processed).

The first photo is where the boy is positioned perfectly, but the sea in the background is a little boring. Also, there is a significant amount of lens flare here as well.

The second photo, I had zoomed out a little (but camera was on a tripod), and we capture the waves breaking on the rocks, but the boy is now on the left hand side of the frame. The overall scene here is much better...

Crashing waves, no lens flare - just wish the kid was better positioned.

And so, the final photograph is the two merged together using photoshop. I used the second photo as the main source for the combined result and then very carefully, using layers and masks, inserted the boy from the first photo to create the final product.

Hope you enjoy.

Chris.