Photographing with stuff in your face!

So there I was, on top of this clock tower with a great view of Washington D.C. The only problem was that the city put these metal bars all over the window to prevent people from falling out I guess.  Unless you had a point and shoot, your lens would not fit in the space between the bars.  What do you do?

I thought about it for a moment and came up with an idea.  You would take a photo with the bars in the shot.  Next you will side step to the left or right slightly and take the exact same shot.  This is best done with a tripod but since I didn't have mine on me, I tried my best to keep the elevation the same.  Remember to side step and not pan.  Due to the distances of the objects you're shooting, when you side step, there is very little shift in the angles.  However, if you pan, you throw everything off, changing the angles dramatically.  You need to keep the elevation of the two shots the same because next you will have to overlay them in Photoshop.

Ensure your camera is in Manual or use the Exposure Lock feature to keep the camera's computer from changing the exposure between the two shots.

When you get home, open up Photoshop or your favorite open source photo editing software such as Gimp.  Load the first photo on the first layer.  Load the second photo on the second layer.  Start erasing the bars on the top layer and presto, you're all done!  (Note: if you dork up the alignment, Photoshop and Gimp should have a feature that automatically does source alignment between 2 layers.)

Awesome!