The triptych is a staple of classical artwork. Separating a frame into three sections, telling three interconnected stories – or one story in three pictures – opens up possibilities for narrative storytelling and composition that traditional single frames can’t match.
It’s natural, then, that triptych photography has been increasingly garnering attention among fine art photographers, and even beyond the trappings of the niche that it evolved from. For all the interesting and creative ways of composition they offer, it can be tricky.
The learning curve can be quite tough – you might not even be sure right off the bat how to set up your camera to shoot a triptych properly! Or is it best to fix it all in post, anyway?
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These kinds of questions are what we will dedicate ourselves to today. In this guide, I will aim to acquaint you with all you need to know to make a start. From technical matters to composition and creative concerns, I will try to give you a holistic overview of everything you need to get started.
Without any further ado, let’s take a look at what makes this unique discipline so exciting!
What is Triptych in Photography?
Fundamentally speaking, the art of triptych photography is not all that different from triptych compositions in other forms of visual art. The key lies in the number of frames – three pictures, usually side by side, sometimes stacked vertically. Everything else is, for the most part, up to the artist.
Just like in classical arts, triptych photography is very popular in fine-art fields such as still life photography. However, that’s definitely not the only niche where triptych photographs can come in handy.
Triptychs have found a lot of success in genres as diverse as advertising, architecture, food photography, and beyond! The key is to have enough of a foundational understanding of the format to be able to use it creatively and expressively.
Working with triptychs forces you to think of your both as one image as well as a collection of all your photos on a certain theme, condensed into a tripartite frame. It is very common for photographers to shoot a long, detailed photo series on a certain subject or theme, and then select three winning photos out of that series to create a triptych.
Of course, you are not limited to that approach whatsoever. But, throughout this guide, I think you will gain a certain appreciation for this and other techniques used by many of the most successful artists in the genre!
Composition: How to Frame Three Images in Unison
The composition would seem to be the most challenging aspect of shooting triptych photography, given that it is the primary aspect in which this genre differs so much from more conventional images.
While it’s true that triptychs force you to think about framing and composition in different ways, it also doesn’t mean that you’ll be forced to reinvent the wheel.
Let’s go over some easy-to-remember key points that are worth jotting down for the next time you attempt a triptych photograph.
Planning
Because a triptych is more than one image, it helps to treat it as a multi-photo project. As such, I highly recommend planning out in advance before even picking up your camera.
Creating triptychs works very well when they follow a certain theme. Whether that theme is purely visual, aesthetic, compositional, or something far more abstract in nature is totally up to you.
What matters most is that you have a concise idea of how these three photos are going to relate to one another. What thread can you think of that could connect them in a meaningful way?
The good news is that your thread can be literally anything you choose! From physical characteristics – weight, texture, reflection – to actions, such as movement or emotions, to abstract concepts such as freedom or homesickness, the world’s your oyster here.
Feel free to take your time as you consider this before you move on to the next stage.
Cause and Effect: Creating a Visual Flow
A great way to think of a triptych is in terms of causality and chronology – each single photo leading up to the next in some way. Hence, you can try thinking of your shots as the introduction, climax, and resolution to one larger story, respectively. Or perhaps you’d like to experiment and rather follow an introduction-buildup-climax approach with a more open-ended narrative?
The point is that a triptych is an awesome storytelling tool that you can use to communicate complex ideas and narratives in a lot of detail. You should make use of that potential by thinking of the structure of your plot, so to speak, when carving out your plans for each of the three parts of your photo.
Having an overarching theme in mind will, of course, make it easier to visualize the structure of this narrative, so I highly recommend dealing with inspiration and concepts first before tackling this step!
Choosing Your Lens(es)
Your choice of focal length makes a gigantic difference to each picture within your set. Even if you are not approaching human subjects and are not setting up traditional three-frame portraits, the differences in perspective and framing afforded by different lenses can have a gigantic impact on how you showcase your personal vision through your photo.
The biggest question, of course, is whether to use one and the same lens for your whole three-piece story or vary between focal lengths for each picture. This is a huge stylistic choice that can greatly affect the emotions and evocative details expressed by your scene.
Varying between lenses throughout the collection of frames tends to exaggerate aesthetic contrasts, so it’s a great choice if you want to add some drama to your composition.
If you are just using one lens for the whole set, your pick of focal length still matters a big deal. A wide lens allows you to fill your frame with more interesting subjects or a wider view of a landscape. It literally expands and makes each slice of the triptych appear more vast and significant.
Conversely, a telephoto lens will achieve much of the opposite. Its effect on composition is narrowing, constricting, and drawing more attention to details that might not leap out of the frame right away through a wider lens.
As always, the choice is yours!
Framing
I already touched on this a bit earlier, but one of the amazing things about triptych photography as opposed to paintings is that you have a huge wealth of options at your disposal in terms of framing your composition.
If you have a real ultrawide lens, for example, you could take a panoramic or near-panoramic shot and simply split it up into three parts to create one triptych photograph. Or you could take three images at a more conventional focal length and stitch them together.
But again, there’s a lot of room for creativity here. Who says, for instance, that all three images have to be a proportionate size to one another? If you feel like emphasizing one frame over the others, whether that’s the middle, the first, or the last, it’s child’s play to add that emphasis in one way or another.
You could of course enlarge one picture, or crop two others, in post-processing. Or, alternatively, you could set up different frame sizes and/or aspect ratios in-camera to give your images differing dimensions.
Add a careful choice of focal length on top, and you could have yourself some very evocative framing!
Displaying Triptychs
Beyond how you frame your pictures in camera and beyond, putting triptychs on display is an art form all of its own. Regardless of whether you are fond of putting your work on physical display in framed print form, experimenting with different layouts and arrangements is easily half the fun!
Be sure to try some of the below techniques at least once, even if only in digital form.
Traditional Display:
Naturally, the majority of triptychs find themselves on display in what I will call the traditional layout. This is to say, a horizontal placement, with all three images in-line, and with matching, equal-size frames. There’s nothing wrong with this approach of course, and conventional as it may be, it does yet offer plenty of room for creativity!
For instance, you can play with the background color and the frame spacing to create a unique and cohesive visual experience. Try to think of this in terms of developing your story and see how the background and the space in between frames can help you communicate with your audience.
On the other hand, vertical placement is also an option. Less common, it is particularly effective for when you wish to break continuity and display three events in sequence, as if they are taking place simultaneously. With that said, vertical placement can also come in handy elsewhere.
For example, think of a flower growth cycle. Displaying all three frames side-by-side, starting with a sapling on the far left and finishing with a withered flower on the right, seems logical and straightforward. But actually, stacking this life cycle vertically may create a much more interesting sense of cause and effect, letting your viewer ponder on the visual theme more deeply.
More Experimental Ways of Displaying Triptychs:
You may also think of other, even more daring display arrangements for your triptychs. There’s the T-junction placement which is particularly beloved by the fine art community, for example. To arrange it in a t-junction involves combining either two horizontal dividing lines with a vertical one or one horizontal split with two verticals.
The result is a triptych that appears more as a pair and a plus one than an equal display of three individual frames. It is very useful for accentuating the particular relationship between two-thirds of your photo and the remaining third.
Other more extravagant options at your disposal include the diagonal display. Be warned, though that this one is a bit trickier to pull off. You will need to either be really good at measuring subject angles during shooting, or splice up a single panoramic photo creatively by transforming your images in post-processing to shift perspective.
The result is a triptych that appears to look at the viewer directly, with the outer two frames flanking them at roughly 45 degrees each. This was a very common arrangement in classical artworks.
Due to the aggressive choice of perspective, it feels as if the triptych is pulling you in, giving the audience a greater sense of immersion. Bonus points if you can manage to combine this with a physical off-set in the angles of the wall or background it is displayed on, further underlining this use of perspective!
Camera Settings for Triptych Images
There is no real need to study any particular camera settings that you don’t likely already know for the purposes of triptych photography. As always, it deserves underlining that a solid grounding in all sides of the exposure triangle and all the various tools your camera offers you goes a long way in any genre, not just this one!
However, you might find that the unique needs of the format will require you occasionally to make use of certain settings in certain ways you may not have considered much before.
For instance, when was the last time you shot in burst mode? Unless your favorite subjects include sports and heavy action, it’s probably a very long time ago, if ever. In triptych photography, though, burst shots can be very handy. They can allow you to quickly create a photo series of moving subjects which you can later stitch together into a triptych at your heart’s content.
Post-Processing Techniques
Through careful use of your software tools, you can either engender or deliberately break visual consistency through the triptych.
To give you just one easy example, consider the issue of color balance. If you took your frames at different times of day and in different locations, the colors in each probably don’t match perfectly, even if the same subject is front and center.
You can remedy this by using post-processing software to equalize the color balance among all three photos. Or, how about you leverage the differential by creating a gradient – let’s say, colder colors in the first frame, a neutral scheme in the middle, and warmer colors last?
There are literally millions of possibilities and millions of variables to toy with here, so I will let your imagination take care of the rest. Suffice it to say that your desktop is where some of the most exciting aspects of a triptych can take place!
Common Mistakes to Avoid for Triptych Photographs
While I highly encourage you to dive in right away and start playing with the wonderful world of possibilities that triptychs offer you, I don’t want to let you go there without some sound advice first.
Believe me, going in with the advantage of hindsight from someone who had to learn quite a lot of stuff the hard way, will save you a lot of frustration!
Keep it Simple
If there is any cardinal sin in triptych photography, it’s what I like to call over-exaggerationification. Just like that word is a chore to even read, let alone pronounce, without really adding any significant meaning not already served by ‘exaggeration‘, there are loads of triptychs that are far busier and visually messier than they have any right to be.
You don’t need one triptych to contain every creative idea you may currently have or every subject there may potentially be in the scene. Far from it.
Avoid making your frames too busy. Maintain focus on your central ideas. Use the triptychs to realize those ideas. Don’t stray from them!
Walk the Tightrope
I already touched on the notion of consistency and how to enforce or subvert it through editing. Well, guess what: this sense of consistency is very, very important in a triptych, and easy to mess up as well!
Shooting a triptych can often involve a very fine balance between making your images similar enough to each other to evoke a theme – without making them too similar so as to be boring.
This is really something you develop a sixth sense of with experience, so I highly suggest you experiment and drill this part thoroughly. Try to shoot the same person from different angles and in different situations, see how you can stitch that together into a compelling triptych set.
Or how about searching for unusual ways of triggering reflection on a certain theme through the use of repetitive compositions? It definitely helps to start with a concise idea. This only increases the chance that your results, too, will be concise.
Becoming Fluent in Triptych Photography
Triptychs are a very fickle thing. On the one hand, they offer you immense possibilities – three times that of a regular photograph, if you want to put a number on it.
On the other hand, you will soon find that that extra real estate is just as much a constraint as it is freedom. It comes with as many new rules as it does away with old ones you may have already picked up.
What this means is, of course, that there is no quick and easy way to get good at shooting a triptych. What I have given you above are the bare basics, and they’ll serve you well in conceptualizing the creative process.
But creating triptychs is something that happens in real-time, in the studio, in the field, and wherever you happen to be shooting! As such, the only way that you’ll be able to get a real grasp on the various concepts we discussed here today is to put them into action – and in your own, personal way.
Good luck!
Take Away
The key to achieving compelling triptych photography is to master your basic skills and techniques, gain a clear understanding of the themes and concepts you wish to explore, and use simple, but carefully chosen compositional techniques to communicate those ideas to your viewer. From then on, practice makes perfect!
