Triptych – revisited

Late last year I posted an article on Triptych (review here) the art in dividing an image into 3 sections, hence why triptych has become very popular in the digital photography field.

This weekend myself and a fellow photographers Mark and Will, where presented with a great opportunity to work with subjects which are ideally suited for presenting in the form of triptych.

The Auckland Classic car club brought together over 450 classic European cars at Lloyd Elsmere recreational park, with a wide range of cars from as early as 1925 right up to one of the new McLaren Spyders.

My personal interest happened to be around cars of the early 70’s through to the early 1980’s more specifically the legendary rally car the Audi Quattro.

So with a triptych in mind, I spent a few minutes walking around my chosen subject and started to capture some key images.

If you recall the tips provided in my previous article, I started to work through some of the key points. As the Audi was white I had no issue dealing with conflicting colours. The lines on the car were well defined so no issue with any distortions which could create an imbalance across your final image

Now it’s important to point out at this stage that you will need to try and keep your colours and exposure consistent. To assist I took an automated shot first just to see what the camera was telling me. Then I flicked over to manual and set the appropriate values.

You should also consider shooting at the highest resolution, RAW if you have the option, Just in case you decide to extract elements from other photos.

Otherwise, if there is a specific feature you would like to emphasize,  then take close ups.
I did this with the wheel rim rather than crop or extract a wheel from another photo.

Camera settings

F11, 1/250, ISO100, -1 exp, 28mm (Custom White Balance), only because the car was white J

So here are my base images.

In terms of processing pretty simple really. I decided to create a template in Photoshop which had the dimensions 1920 x 720pixels. I then used the guides to split the image into thirds which resulted in each section being 640pixels wide.

I then split each section into it's own layer and imported the required photos.

I used layer masks to hide areas, this way I had the option to disable and reposition without losing any of the image outside.

 

 

 

And that is pretty much it.

 

Here are a few of my final results. Enjoy