Hav­ing got­ten to some beau­ti­ful loc­a­tion, do you also some­times wish that — espe­cially when trav­el­ling — you were the only per­son there? How many times do we try to take pho­tos with as little other people on it as pos­sible? Maybe what is hap­pen­ing is that (sub­con­sciously) we believe that the pic­ture will be more spe­cial without other tour­ists in it, as in we were the only per­son cap­tur­ing this won­der­ful moment /​place.

While of course there are many situ­ations where it is much more aes­thetic to have no per­sons in the pic­ture (also, from a com­pos­i­tional point of view, people usu­ally draw a lot of atten­tion to them, away from other poten­tial sub­jects in the pic­ture), fel­low humans can also give a bit of life and fun to a pic­ture, or a situ­ation.

Take the pic­ture above. I had just set up to take the shot of the Cathed­ral of Bra­silia when a horde of tour­ist poured out of a bus and jumped into the pic­ture to take their group photo. I almost got annoyed by what I felt to be a rather rude thing to do, but then I saw that those crazy young people actu­ally give so much more live­li­ness to the shot (com­pare it to this shot someone else pos­ted on flickr). In a moment of adven­ture, I asked if they all could cheer and wave and scream — and spon­tan­eously they did!

So here’s some­thing to think about: Tour­ists may also be your friend in pic­tures! Also, inten­tion­ally includ­ing people helps to give scale and per­spect­ive to some shots. Here are some more examples (1, 2, 3).