This week, Ann-Christine’s challenge for us is to think in three parts. She writes, “With Three of a Kind, I want you to think about things related to your photo – maybe a book (even interesting inside?), a flower, a room, a piece of art… Almost anything will fit in here – you could make your three images tell a story too! Simply put: Your post should have three separate images that are somehow related.” The technical name for this art of three is a triptych. You can read her entire challenge post here.

This week, I am visiting family in North Carolina, so please excuse the brevity of my response. I did, however, learn to use a new (to me) tool just to help me show off my final project, two triptych image sets. I like those ultra-wide panoramic images, but they can be difficult to have printed because of the unusually long image size. For this project, I took one panorama of the Grand Canyon and chopped off each end. If I were to print the image for hanging on a wall, it would consist of three normal size prints. I think the image set would look really nice printed on metal.

On a visit to the Denver Botanical Gardens, I not only captured some beautiful flowers, but I also spotted a volunteer preparing the ground for new planting. I decided this triptych would tell the story that you don’t get beautiful flowers without putting forth the effort.

To make these triptych images, I did my usual processing in Lightroom. Then, for the first time since subscribing to the Creative Cloud, I downloaded and installed Photoshop. I wanted to simulate a frame around each image of the floral story. For practice, I used the Grand Canyon images to build a white frame around each image, but since I imagine the images on borderless metal, I didn’t want the frame to be visible.

With the story, however, I used Photoshop to create black frames around the three images to simulate a framed print. To get WordPress to show the images in a row instead of separate images, or in a WordPress gallery, I put the related images together to create a single PNG file that could be displayed more easily in this post.

Thanks, Ann-Christine, for a unique challenge that actually got me off dead center and starting to use the Photoshop app that I’ve been paying for. Next week it’s Sofia’s turn to share her challenge with us all. Her topic is Minimalism/Maximalism. If you’d like to join in the fun but wonder how, just click here.

John Steiner