So there you are with your digital camera ready to take that perfect shot.

But the problem is that there are just too many people in the way of your perfect shot. So you stand there, waiting, hoping that for one brief moment, your target will achieve perfect clarity. It doesn't happen. Or it almost happens but the perfect shot that you've taken will forever have the backs of those three obnoxious tourists in short pants, hats and sunglasses, waving at something. Or your perfect shot is in front of a busy road with cars passing by and you just can't get a clear, unobstructed picture. I'm sure you are reminded of the many times your photographs have been marred by some moving thing that didn't belong there but you just didn't have a way of taking that picture without them.

Now while it's true that you can use photo-manipulative software like Photoshop to remove unwanted items, removing complex images like people and the like requires some degree of skill. And while things like masking and retouching have been made somewhat easier to do in the most recent iterations of these programs, they can still be very time consuming and the results may be somewhat less than ideal. Fortunately there's a new solution to this age-old problem and you can find it on a website.

Aptly named the "Tourist Remover," this amazing service is available on the SnapMania website which is actually a very nice online digital photo manager. SnapMania lets you create web albums in which you can organize and manage your virtual shoebox of digital photos into collections that make sense. However I want to focus on the Tourist Remover because quite frankly there are many such online photo services but as far as I have been able to determine, the Tourist Remover feature is unique.

The Tourist Remover attempts to remove anything in a picture that is MOVING.

Here's how it works. When you come across a location you wish to photograph and there are things in constant motion that keep blocking out the view such as people walking by, you begin the process by taking multiple pictures of the same view in rapid succession. SnapMania suggests that the more images you take, the better the chance of removing the things that are moving. And while placing your camera on a tripod is ideal, the company says that really isn't necessary. You can shoot the pictures with the camera in your hands.

What's important is that you capture the moving objects differently in each snapshot of the same view.

So obviously if you have a person standing in your way and they are standing still in every image you take, this isn't going to work. The idea is to have the same picture with people walking by. The more movement there is from picture to picture, the better the final outcome of removing them from the shot. Once you have taken the pictures, the next step is to upload all of them to the SnapMania website and apply the Tourist Remover option. The Tourist Remover is actually a very sophisticated image analysis program that compares each image to the others. Amazingly it can actually determine what is and isn't moving from one photo to the next. This is why you'll get better results with more pictures. The more images the Tourist Remover has to compare, the better it can determine what is moving.

The final result is a single photograph that displays the entire stationary view without the objects that were moving. It does this in part by locating all the different areas that were blocked from view in different shots and combining them into one final photograph that displays the entire unobstructed area. You really have to see this to believe it and there are several examples on the SnapMania website for you to see.

Obviously Tourist Remover cannot make an image of something that is blocked in all of the pictures. That's why it is important to make sure that each part of the background you want to photograph must be captured in at least two of the photographs. The more images you submit to the Tourist Remover the better, because your chance of having the entire background available somewhere increases with the number of images you submit. The accuracy in its detection of moving objects increases as well.

SnapMania offers a free registration that includes 100 megabytes of storage for your images and access to the Tourist Remover feature. Paid accounts offer additional storage and abilities of course.

So thanks to the miracle of technology, you no longer have to settle for any more of those crowded photographic images. Now you can stand on the Las Vegas Strip or the middle of Times Square and take shot after shot of empty streets. People will be incredulous and ask how you took such amazingly barren images. Or how about taking pictures at the baseball, football, basketball or hockey game and wind up with beautiful pictures of empty playing fields without those annoying players blocking the view? I bet with a little creative thought, you can really have some fun with this website and your digital camera. I know I am.

www.snapmania.com