What is a diptych? In photography, it’s a photograph composed of two photographs. What’s a triptych? It’s the same, but with three photographs. Think of it as an organized minimalist collage.

Here is a triptych I made:

Can you see the use of the triptych style here? Rather than simply having Jennifer show off this sealed DVD set, there’s a close-up of the title at the upper-right, and a close-up of a character artwork at the lower-right. I have chosen to show this scene from multiple angles so that different aspects are seen at the same time.

I have done the same with the following scene:

In the main photograph (on the left), we see Godzilla has kidnapped little Aryll, and Link is readying an attack to defeat the giant monster with. However, the distance leaves Aryll far away, and the focus leaves Link’s blurred. By using the triptych style, the two kids are able to be shown close-up alongside the main photograph.

Making Your Own -tychs

So, how does one make their own diptych or triptych? I’ll show a diptych tutorial! Triptych is essentially the same, but with one extra step along the way. I’ll show a diptych to keep is simple.

Note that all of these screenshots are being taken on a Linux computer. The interface for Inkscape should be the same for Windows and Mac OS X, but file open dialogs may differ, and non-Inkscape software shown (file manager) will differ.

Download and Install Inkscape

The first place to begin is by downloading and installing Inkscape if you don’t already have it. Don’t worry about cost: it’s free software. Legally free. At the time of the writing, version 0.46 is their latest release, so that’s what I’m using for this tutorial.

Oh, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself! Just what is Inkscape? It’s a vector-based imagine editing program. If you’ve seen Adobe Illustrator CS4 (US$599.00), CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 (US$129.99 to US$355.99), or Xara Xtreme (US$89.00), then you’ll have an idea of what Inkscape (US$0.00) is and can do.

For this tutorial, very little of Inkscape’s features will be used, and they likely can be translated to any of the aforementioned programs with ease.

Luckily, Inkscape needs only be downloaded and installed the first time through the process!

Take Photographs and Process Them

This is actually easier said than done! You should have an idea of what you want your diptyck to be of. Maybe you want to half a photo of a doll and a photo of a flower. Will they be side-by-side, or one over the other? Will the doll photo is wider/taller than the flower photo, or will they be the same size?

Here are my photographs:

My plan is to have the two side-by-side, with the first photograph wider than the second.

At this point, processing can be done in a separate image editor (such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Paint.NET, or GIMP). This includes adjusting lighting and shadows, colors, styling photographs in some way, etc. All these things are beyond the scope of this tutorial, as this tutorial focuses on the diptych portion.

If you are editing the images anyways, feel free to rotate them if they are sideways. Otherwise, this step can be done in Inkscape, as will be the case with my photographs.

Import Images into Inkscape

Run Inkscape, then select the “File” menu, sub-menu item “Save As…”. Save the file. This will save a copy of your Inkscape file (currently empty) on your computer. I’ve chosen to save it in the same folder as the photographs, so they’re all in one place.

From “File”, select the submenu “Import”. Navigate to the folder where your photos are stored. You can either import the photos one at a time from here.

Resize and Rotate Photographs

There are two areas circled in red here. The lower one is the page zoom. I like to lower this to 20% at this point so I can see what I’m doing. The upper circle is the corner of the selected photograph(s). The selected photograph(s) can be resized from this anchor point (or any of the other anchors around the image).

Select all photographs from the “Edit” menu, submenu item “Select All”.

To resize the photographs, left-click on an image anchor at a corner of the image. Hold down the left mouse button and the Ctrl key. The Ctrl key ensures the image keeps its proportions when being resized.

Typically, I resize the image to about 1000×750 pixels (for a wide photograph). The height and width can be changed directly from the “W” and “H” text boxes on the second toolbar shown in the screenshot. Clicking on the lock icon will ensure the image is kept in proportion when resized from there.

If necessary, rotate the photographs. When a photograph (or multiple photographs) selected, go to the “Object” menu, then select “Rotate 90° CW” (or “Rotate 90° CCW”, as necessary).

Layout the Diptych

A few things are circled here. We’ll start at the top-left, and work clockwise.

Click on the Square tool on the left toolbar, then draw a rectangle with it. The size and placement don’t matter yet.

Click on the upper toolbar’s paintbrush icon to access fill and stroke options. Click on the “Stroke paint” tab, then on the X mark to disable the stroke.

The next part can be done either from the “Fill” tab, or from the two circled areas at the bottom of the screen. Select a color for the square (something light), and set the opacity to about 70.

You can close the fill/stroke panel by clicking on the small X at the top-right corner of the panel.

Resize the rectangle to a size fitting for the final image to be. Move your phorographs around, and resize them as necessary, to help decide on the size of the rectangle. Once I know about what size I want, I’ll use the “W” and “H” boxes at the top (with the lock unlocked) to set the size to a multiple of ten (personal preference). In this case, I’ve gone with 1000×800 for the rectangle.

I went ahead and zoomed in to 40% to better see what I’m doing. The next step is to draw another rectangle. Since my diptych will be two photos side-by-side, I want to draw a tall, thin rectangle, taller than my layout rectangle. If they diptych will be one photo above another, then the rectangle must be short and wide, wider than the layout rectangle. I like to put ten pixels between my photographs, so I will set the width of this second rectangle to ten pixels.

Position this skinny rectangle exactly where you want there to be whitespace between the two photographs. Feel free to move and resize the images to get a better idea of the layout. If one image is blocking another, click on the image and select the “Object” menu, then “Lower to Bottom” to move it below.

Select both rectangles by holding Shift and clicking on the two of them.

(If you want the split to be directly down the middle, you can use the “Align” panel from the upper toolbar. Set the align panel’s relative to as “Selection”, then click on the “Center on vertical axis” and “Center on horizontal axis” buttons, shown in the screenshot.)

With both rectangles selected, click on the “Path” menu, submenu “Difference”. This will remove the thin rectangle from the big one, essentially cutting the layout rectangle in two pieces. It’s still considered once object by Inkscape, so click on the “Path” menu again, and select the submenu “Break Apart” to split it into two rectangles.

(At this point, I could make this into a triptych layout by making another thin rectangle, then repeating the “Path”, “Difference” and “Path”, “Break Apart” steps.)

Make the Diptych

Do any final resizing and moving of the photographs. Just be sure not to move or resize the layout rectangles! (“Edit” menu, “Undo” submenu is your friend if you accidentally do!) You want the photograph to be bigger than its layout rectangle on all sides. This is important, or the final image will not be layed out properly.

Once you have a photograph positioned under a layout rectangle, and the photograph is selected, hold Shift and click on the layout rectangle over it to select it as well. With the two selected, click on the “Object” menu, “Clip” submenu, and from there the “Set” submenu. This will hide everything in the photograph that’s outside of the layout rectangle.

Repeat this for the second photograph (and the third if working on a triptych).

Add a Border

I can finish with the image right now, but I want to ensure the photograph will have the color white in the ten pixel area between photographs, and I also want to put a ten pixel white border around the diptych.

To begin, I need to know what size my image is. It’ll be the same size as the layout rectangle, but I’ll go ahead and group the pieces to the diptych together, and that will give the size as well.

First, select both parts (“Edit”, “Select All”), then group them together (“Object”, “Group”). This makes them into one single object. Moving one image will now move both. Also, when the diptych is selected, the W and H at the second toolbar at the top list the dimensions. In my case, it’s 1000×800.

Second, draw a new rectangle. (It will still be the same color and opacity as the layout rectangle was before. Don’t worry about this right now.) Since I want to add ten pixels of white border on either side of the top/bottom and left/right of the diptych, and I’ll resize the rectangle to 1020×820. This all uses the same steps as used earlier in this tutorial for drawing and resizing a rectangle.

Third, select both the diptych and the rectangle (“Edit”, “Select All”). We want to align them properly. Click on the “Align” button on the upper toolbar (it’s the button with three horizontal bars). When the align panel opens, set the align panel’s relative to as “Selection”. Click on the “Center on vertical axis” and “Center on horizontal axis” buttons to center the two items together.

At this point, you should see the rectangle completely covering your diptych, and a little larger than it. By the sizes I selected, the two images in my diptych have ten pixels of whitespace between them, and the border rectangle is ten pixels wider than the diptych on all sides.

Unselect the objects (“Edit”, “Deselect”), then click on the rectangle. Using the bottom area of Inkscape, select the color white and set the opacity as 100. This is the same as back when the layout rectangle’s color and opacity were first set.

Move the border rectangle to below the photograph (“Object”, “Lower to Bottom”).

Finally, with the border rectangle still selected, it’s time to export the final diptych! From the “File” menu, select the “Export Bitmap” submenu item. The “Selection” button should be selected, with the Width and Height matching the size of the border rectangle. Input a folder path and filename to save the image to (with a .png extension), then click on the Export button. If you want to convert it from PNG format to JPG format, you’ll need to use another program.

Admire Your Diptych

Sit back and admire your finished work.

It seems like a lot of steps, but after going through them a few times and getting used to the process, you’ll find the process is very quick and easy. You need only know a few tools, how to resize images, and the like. Get used to doing these things, and learn keyboard shortcuts for moving photographs above/below each other (PgUp/PgDown), you’ll find yourself making diptychs faster than you can upload them to show off to the world!

There are sayings about how less is more and how it is easier to work with tight constraints than it is to work with loose ones. If I say, “Draw a picture,” you might ask, “What should I draw?” You might set a pencil to paper, then hesitate, not sure what to draw. In instead I say, “Draw a picture of a cat stuck in a free, and a firefighter climbing a ladder to rescue him,” drawing becomes easy.

Photography is the same. When the subject does not, can not move, becomes (relatively!) simple to photograph. Make sure the lighting is right. Move to the right angle. Zoom if necessary for whatever reason. Shoot. Move to another angle. Shoot again. Reframe the scene differently. Shoot again.

No matter how many times I take a photograph of a toy, such as the Pinky Street figures seen above, I never have to worry about their pose. I simply ensure they are standing in the right place, facing the right way, and then I look for the right distance and angle.

Enter “Jun Planning”, and its Pullip, TaeYang, and Dal dolls. These dolls (as well as others from the company) come with bodies that can be posed in a limited number of ways. Suddenly I have a subject that can be standing up or sitting down. The knees can bend, and the arms can be here or there or somewhere else. To add to this, other companies make compatible bodies, including the much-praised Obitsu line of bodies from Obitsu Plastic Manufacturing, known to Pullip owners for their increased posing ability over the stock Pullip bodies. Imagine being able to pose a character with such (relative) precision! (Let’s not even get started on changing outfits to bring new looks to already-used poses now.)

Look at how casual Daniel is as he relaxes! Who hasn’t sat back with their hands behind their head like that before? Who hasn’t sat on the a bed with one leg straight along the bed, and the other hanging off the side? This photograph has something special because the photographer (me!) put that extra effort into getting the pose to be right.

Posing is about more than the bend of the knee and the twist of the arm. Does the pose look real? If it doesn’t look realistic, then it can be jarring to the viewer.

Look carefully at Daniel here as he prepares to help someone up. With one hand, he takes her hand in his. The other hand is on his knee. One knee is on the ground to keep steady when he helps her up to her feet. His other knee is up, as that leg will allow him to “push” himself up, helping pull her up to her feet as well. His free hand is on his knee in case he needs to push on his knee a little to stand up as well.

The viewer doesn’t need to think about all these placements. If Daniel’s right arm was at his side, the pose would look off somehow, and that might cause the viewer to wonder what doesn’t seem right about the photograph. They shouldn’t have to wonder why something doesn’t seem “real” about it. The photographer must put in the work to ensure the viewer doesn’t have to.

Again, there’s more to it than the arms and legs. Once those are in a real-looking position, what about the hair? The clothes? Consider the next image.

Is anything wrong here? What could be wrong? Melanie’s pose here looks very realistic. I can see myself standing like that (and I from time to time do!), so why would something be wrong?

Look at Melanie’s clothes. Look at the shoulder straps on her overalls. They’re…they’re floating! Oops! The material for this outfit is a bit stiff, and the fit is a bit tight around the skirt portion, so when Melanie has one leg stretched out forward a little, the outfit pushes upward. If her legs were both straight, the outfit could be pulled down a little, and it would rest carefully on her shoulders. If I paid attention, I would have noticed this problem with the shoulder straps, and I could have tried some ways to compensate for it.

Even after the pose and the clothing are right, there’s still the hair to compensate for. Aaah! Maybe this is enough for me to think about for today.

Here we see Sakura before her meal.

And here she is after!

Well, maybe it didn’t happen quite like that.

But the effect can be powerful when shown to someone unfamiliar with the technique.

The first photograph is a macro photograph, with a high focal length. (Um, did this mean the camera was zoomed and the figure farther, or the figure was closer with no zooming? I have forgotten…) The macro mode creates a blurry background, while keeping the subject in focus.

The second photograph is a typical snapshot.

Even taking a close-up macro photographs of a small figure can fascinate someone when they see the small figure held beside the large photograph on a computer monitor.

Are the shadows over Sakura’s eyes too dark in these photographs? I must pay more attention, and find ways to decrease the amount of dark shadow over a character’s face. I’ll keep photographing, and I’ll continue to learn more!

Aperture	Focal Length	Result
f/5.14	17 mm
f/3.91	11.5 mm
f/2.67	6 mm

Is little Ana Coppola growing taller? Or is everything shrinking around her? Ana and the items in the background haven’t moved a millimeter. Only the camera has moved!

In my prior posting, I tried to understand camera terminology. Now it is time for me to apply them. As the aperture and focal length become smaller numbers, the subject remains the same size (due to moving the camera while zooming to maintain the same size of subject), and the background becomes smaller, wider.

Practically, the higher the focal length, the bigger the background is. The higher the focal length, the more magnified the background is, but the foreground stays the same. How does the camera do this? It must be magic.

I wrote about aperture, … a lower number [aperture] means a narrower depth of field, which leads to a blurry background and [a] close foreground …. However, the background in f/5.14 looks more blurry to me than the background in f/2.67. I will continue to take photographs where I can compare the aperture, so I can better understand how to control blurring the background when I want to.

Maybe that’s confusing to say. I’ll let my photos do the talking for me.

Consider three figures. Chika, the black-haired girl in the background, plays the part of the background subject. Typically this will be something large and distant. It may be a moutain, or the Statue of Liberty. In the middle is Ana, the blond-haired girl. She plays the part of the main subject. This is typically a person, but may be an object. The bleached-orange-haired girl, Miu, acts as the photographer.

During these photos, the positions between Ana (the main subject) and Chika (the background subject) will not change. Only two factors will change from one set of photos to the next: 1) The position of Miu (the photographer) relative to Ana (the main subject), and 2) the camera’s zoom.

Miu standing closer to Ana	Miu standing midway distance	Miu standing farther from Ana
N/A

As Miu (the photographer) moves further away from Ana (the subject), it appears that Chika (the background subject) becomes bigger! She becomes bigger because of zooming, but the visual position between Miu and Ana is mostly sustained. Even though Miu is moving the same distance from Chika as she is Ana, Chika is already farther away to begin with, and zooming appears to have a bigger effect for her. Or is this just a trick to my eyes?

I need to try this again with an actual large background image. I believe I can create a more noticeable effect this way.

By the way, here is Miu playing with a video camera, and zooming in on a car. How will she ever avoid the very distant zoomed-in-close oncoming vehicle?

I will continue to experiment with distances.

The easiest type of photograph seems to be with a sky in the background. On a sunny day, the sky is very well lit (thanks Mr. Sun!), and when it’s evening, the sun’s light casts shadows just right for a silhouette.

I took this photo just before evening, as the sun was readying its departure for the night, but before it had a chance to change the sky from blue to red. Had I stayed out longer, I could have re-taken the photo with an orange sky, with a red sky, and with a purple sky, allowing me to decide which came out the best.

What I like about this photo is that Chloë isn’t completely a silhouette. Her features are still partially visible. What I don’t care for is how bland the background is. I’d like to try a different kind of photo, where the subject and an object (such as a tree) are both in the photo, two distinct photographs, but the placement of two-story housing where I live doesn’t really lend to this type of photograph.

A little bit of light showing details is nice when the it may not be clear who or what the subject is by looking at the silhouette alone. If the silhouette is instantly recognizable, these is no need to show the details, and it becomes less of a necessity and more of an artist direction.

For this photograph, I didn’t put much thought or planning into it, and it shows. My only goal here was to get more of a silhouette, removing the ability to barely see any features. The back-light came as a foggy morning, before the sun crowned the horizon. To improve this photo, the first thing to do would be to take the photo with a different background, something fitting of the subject.

The reason I chose a figure of a ballerina for this photo is because a ballerina’s silhouette is unmistakable. The close-fitting outfit, the extending tutu, the positions of the arms, and the closeness of the legs, all speak out, “I am a ballerina, and this is Swan Lake.” (Incidentally, I haven’t seen Swan Lake yet, so I don’t know if this pose appears in Swan Lake, or if it’s a common pose in ballet, or if the figure’s designer even considered to use a “real” ballet pose when designing this figure of Rue.)

I’ll continue to experiment with photographing silhouettes. Maybe I can take some nice photographs of silhouettes during the early evening while I’m in San Diego during Comic-Con!

Last year I took plenty of snapshots (uno, dos, tres, cuatro).

This year, I want things to be at least a little different. Rather than snapshots, I want to do compositions. Sure, I’ll probably do plenty of snapshots as well, but I want to produce something more. But, I don’t see myself as ready for it. At least, I didn’t until I read this comment by PhotoNewt at the Digital Photography School forums:

As others have mentioned your problem is that this photo has no clear subject. There is a difference between taking a snapshot and making a photographic composition.

A snapshot (and there is nothing wrong with taking snapshots when needed) is a quick photo intended to document a place or a moment. This is not a creative composition and is what most of us shoot around family events and during vacations. Knowing about composition and photographic technique will make your snapshots much better than those of other snapshooters in the family.

A photographic composition is an artistic rendition of a subject, it begins by selecting a subject, then deciding what you want to say or accentuate on that subject, then deciding how are you going to compose it — all of this BEFORE even setting up the camera. This mental process will lead to the proper selection of exposure parameters, color balance, filters, viewpoint, distance to subject and others to achieve the look that you have already composed on your mind.

In my humble opinion, if you need to analyze your photo after the fact to define what the subject is, is a snapshot!

Wow. That says a whole lot to me about where I’ve been lacking. I can immediately apply this to photos I took at Glen Arbor Park today.

Here, the subject was “that area over there”. End result? It’s just a snapshop, no matter how it’s looked at.

And what do I have here? The subject is…the plant up close? That can’t be it, as it gets cut off awkwardly, and the green of the background plant fights the green of the foreground plant.

Again, what is the subject here? The plant on the left? The trunk of the tree on the fight? They appear to be locked in an eternal struggle to be the subject of the photo.

Even though this one is also snapshot level, I think it has potential. I actively wanted to highlight the path going into the forest. That was my subject I wanted to take a photo of. As a subject, however, the path is horribly under-represented. The bright sky also interferes. If the path took up 2/3 rather than 1/3 of the bottom of the photo, at the expense of the sky, then maybe the photo would have turned out a little better.

Finally, this is my “I got lucky that it looks fairly decent” snapshot. No subject in mind here, either, except for “that area there”.

When taking a photo of an object, such as a toy, it’s easy to say, “The toy is the subject.” When taking a photo of scenery, however, it’s easy to say, “The subject is this scenery,” as if that’s all it takes.

I’ll be sure to take subject into consideration the next time I’m photographing nature or buildings. I’ll keep PhotoNewt’s words in mind when I photograph trains and buildings during my return trip to the San Diego Convention Center.

Simply imagining a grid isn’t going to turn a snapshot into a work of art, but it’s a good start. It works out very well when it’s plain and clear specifically what’s being lined up on the grid. (It might hope out extra to have a camera which shows the grid on the display screen, but alas my camera has no feature.)

Back before photography became a hobby for me, if I were going to photograph something, I’d place it in the center of the image, as seen with Sasha above. There’s no problem with the photo, right? Actually, to be honest, I kind of like it.

Reworking the scene to put Sasha between the middle and right thirds of the image has failed to impress me. Maybe it’s because Sasha looks less like she’s standing on the pathway, and more in the plants?

I decided to try a change of background, and this vastly improved the image. If it weren’t for the reflections of the sunlight, this might almost be a decent snapshot.

Unfortunately, that’s all I see in these photos, is snapshots. Never mind that there was little composition put into them, and that I only took one photo of each scene. I’m left asking myself, “What could I have improved when taking a photo? Could post-processing in Gimp have improved the look of the photo? Can playing with levels and saturation alone transform a snapshot into something ‘Wow’?”

In these images, there’s a visible lack of composition. There’s no connection between the subject (Sasha) and her surroundings. Maybe that’s the first thing I need to address.