Montage

poses panels freya vertical reflections Simon Q. Walden, FilmPhotoAcademy.com, sqw, FilmPhoto, photography

THINKING:

I had worked in this abandoned office space before and knew I wanted to create this shot with Freya. Right from the start, I knew I would meld the three partitions together to a single image and from there it was simple.

I explained to Freya how I was going to finish the image and that she could work how she liked within the space but must not cross into another frame.

SEEING:

A classic version of the frame within a frame - but to the power of three. It creates an immediate triptych.

All the lines are strongly vertical and Freya's three poses are kept strong in the frame by repeating the vertical positioning but with strong S curves to give them contrast against the verticals.

The central panel with the window filling the main part of the panel provides a strong focal light source and so the arms are posed out to the edges of the central frame to connect the outer two panels, which are in turn reflections of each other.

These gives a strong symmetry to the image which could appear static if it was not for the different effects of the open doorway and the two glazed panels which give completely different tonalities to the three figures.

DOING:

Ideally this would have been shot on a tripod, but because of the difficulties of getting to the location, I had to shoot handheld. As it happened I aligned the panels by hand, but Photoshop does have an auto-align feature that can be very useful. There was also slight lens distortion and I squared off the image to counteract this using the free transform tool.

We shot many different poses in the three frames and then it was a question of selecting the correct combinations. I produced several variations, some of the fingers echoing poses, some reflecting poses, some with very different poses. Each tells a different story, but the echoes or reflections are always stronger.

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