Multiple exposure - triptych

A recent challenge from a local camera club was to produce a triptych - three images in one frame. The three images in a triptych should be related in some way. For example they might tell a story, have a common theme, or show three views of the same subject.

A favourite painting is "The Garden of Earthly Delights" - a triptych by the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, dated about 1500. Bosch's painting is very complex, full of fantasy, symbolism and metaphor. The painting is a mystery - today no one seems to have a full understanding of its meaning.

Inspiration for the camera club's challenge comes from Bosch's bizarre painting - it steals a few simple ideas as a basis. Here is the result:

 Triptych

A technical inspiration is the use of multiple exposures. I had been exploring the creative possibilities of multiple exposures, and testing a few ideas using fruit as the subject. Most of the triptych is composited from multiple exposures of fruit. Some examples:

In each case, the multiple exposure image has been created in-camera by a Canon 5D mark III in Darken" multiple exposure mode.

Multiple exposure - Abstract - for Alex

A life at sea

Shipwreck and rescue. This abstract image celebrates the life of Alexander Scott Masson who spent most of his adult life at sea.

Multiple exposure - Falls of Feugh

Spent an hour on the footbridge over the Falls of Feugh taking a large number of multiple exposure images. This image is from three images originally blended in camera, with some minor re-working in Photoshop (white balance, crop and sharpen).

 Blue Feugh

Multiple exposure

 Multiple exposure images of the past season's barley fields in Aberdeenshire.

Muir of Fowlis

Near Tough

Images are created in-camera with post-processing limited to crop, mono conversion and adjustments to exposure, contrast and clarity.

Intentional Camera Movement

The genre of Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) is not to everyone's taste, but the ICM images of Chris Friel and Valda Bailey are some of the most exciting photographic images that I have seen.

Over the last couple of years I have spent a few days exploring some of the possibilities of ICM. Despite the perception by some that ICM is "just waving the camera around" it really isn't that easy.

Classic starting points for ICM include groups of trees (slow vertical pans) and beaches (slow horizontal pans). It is relatively easy to get some pleasing images with these well-worn subjects, but my efforts with fully hand-held ICM (no tripod) have achieved a poor success rate. I have fired the shutter several hundred times in front of birch trees and now have three of four images that might be considered OK.

The nature of ICM means you do not have full control over the end image. There is inevitably a large element of chance in the end result. Control over the images is achieved mainly through the choice of appropriate shutter speeds, and appropriate camera movements while the shutter is open. Depending on the circumstances, shutter speeds between say 0.5s and 10 seconds might give optimum results. Post processing is also important, but this does not have to be complicated. Post processing can often be limited to careful cropping, and adjustments to white balance, contrast and clarity.

A few months ago I took some ICM images at Aberdeen railway station. I revisited the railway station a few days ago. Here are some of the results.

Lightbox images

Lightboxes are used to provide strong backlights. I've been experimenting with one such device to illuminate flowers and include the translucency of petals and leaves in images.

Poppy

This poppy came from my garden. I had been unsuccessful in trying to capture an image of a poppy with backlight and showing light through the petals. I brought the flower into the house where I could use a lightbox as a source of backlight. The lightbox was placed on the floor and the poppy was placed on the lightbox. The camera was tripod mounted with a cable release attached. Aperture was set to f/18 to ensure sharp image. A few trial shots showed that a short exposure in the order of 1/15s resulted in an image that was close to a silhouette of the flower with little colour visible, and a long exposure of 15s was sufficient to produce an image that was almost entirely burnt out.

Based on this, I decided that seven shots taken at 1-stop intervals would adequately cover the range of useful exposures - that fastest at 1/8s and longest at 8s. These seven shots were followed by one further shot with the lightbox switched off and using natural light through a window to obtain a normally exposed image.

The images were opened in Photoshop and stacked as layers (The relevant commands to do this are: File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack... Add Open Files, and tick the checkbox Attempt to Automatically Alight Source Images.) The darkest image, 1/8s exposure, was placed as the bottom layer and the extra shot with the lightbox switched off was placed at the top. It's handy to know the command to reverse the order of layers here: Layer > Arrange > Reverse.

Starting with the bottom darkest layer, each subsequent layer is processed in turn: a black layer mask is added to the next layer and a white brush is used manually to selectively paint in parts of the layer.

Orange poppy

Deconstructed orange poppy

Quiraing

I recently spent two days on the Isle of Skye where I had hoped to get some amazing images of the Quiraing. I set out to walk up the Quiraing but the weather seriously deteriorated so I turned back when I was only half way up. It's not obvious from this image but the rain was heavy.

The Quiraing 

A test shot showed that the light conditions were difficult with a very wide range of light intensities from bright patches in the sky to very dark shadows in the cliffs. In these circumstances one potential solution is to use an HDR (high dynamic range) process to merge multiple images where two of the shots are exposed correctly for the brightest parts and darkest parts of the scene, and other shots are correctly exposed for intermediate light intensities.

Successful HDR usually requires a tripod to ensure that the series of shots are well aligned with each other, but here I did not have a tripod. The solution was to brace against a convenient rock. Each of these images has been made using five shots in aperture priority mode with shutter speeds ranging from 1/320s to 1/20s, all at aperture f/8 and ISO 400.

With these settings I knew that the images would individually be sharp enough. My main worry was with camera movement between shots and whether the five images could be properly aligned. In the end I needn't have worried because the HDR software (Nik HDR Pro 2) does a good job aligning images taken under these conditions.

Return from Quiraing

I do not like the unnatural look that I normally associate with HDR images; In order to obtain a relatively natural look I used the default settings throughout, but then did some further processing using Photoshop layers because output from HDR was rather flat.

Photoshop layers

The various Photoshop layers are shown here. The bottom layer "Layer 0" is the output from the HDR process. I then added a dodge and burn layer. This is a blank layer filled with 50% gray with the blend mode set to "Overlay". A dodge and burn layer allows you to selectively lighten and darken parts of the image. Just use a soft brush  with low opacity and flow (both set to about 20% here) and paint black or white onto the layer. I then added a curves layer and mask, "Curves 1", to selectively add local contrast. Finally I added a levels layer to adjust the white point ensuring that the entire image was not too dark.