project 5 Shoot delicate structures and create a fine-art, mono triptych

Hollie Latham reveals how to create an artistic triptych fit for your wall

as the saying goes, ‘good things come in threes’, so we’re going to reveal some top tips on shooting and selecting images to create a beautiful, artistic triptych. Having the opportunity to display more than a single frame as a finished piece will enable you to tell a story, reveal different sides of a subject or repeat a particular theme across varying subjects that work together in unison.

Triptychs work well for a range of genres and subjects, and in this project we’re going to show you how even the simplest of objects can create beautiful artwork. Here, we’ve collected a variety of grasses and weeds which are readily available in the countryside at this time of year. By stripping away distractions and shooting these subjects against a plain white background, we can focus our attention on the delicate designs of these plant structures. By adding a macro lens into the mix we can get up close to reveal even the most fragile of details for an abstract composition.

As we’ll be getting in close to our subject, we require a bit of extra light to reveal the shapes and textures and add some depth to our images, so we’ll be using off-camera flash triggered by our camera’s pop-up flash to light our subjects (if your camera doesn’t have a pop-up flash, you’ll need to use an off-camera flash cable, or trigger it from a second flashgun instead). To ensure we don’t capture any garish shadows we will diffuse the light by firing the flash through a reflector to soften and spread the beam.

Once we’ve taken a series of images of our subject, it’s then down to choosing three that will sit well together before taking them into the digital darkroom to assemble the triptych.