3.35. The joiner

In the pre-digital era, it was fun to see your pictures immediately with the aid of Polaroid instant film, and it is still used in professional photography for test exposures to cut down film costs. Artists have exploited the material, scratching, scraping, and separating its layers. The joiner is another clever technique, taking multiple shots of a scene and assembling them into a collage. Made famous by David Hockney, in his hands the joiner had echoes of Cubism and reverse perspective, where objects are larger when they are closer to the point of view.

A joiner is different from a "stitched" photograph. It is recognizably composed of its individual pictures, which form a collage of squares, overlapping like fish scales and casting small drop shadows. Depending on the camera and lens quality, the pictures may be vignetted or darkened around the edges, giving the composite a beveled character. Your choice of subject is endless, but the effect probably works best when the composition has a wide-angle view, with features scattered around the frame.

You can assemble your joiner from a series of shots. This requires a camera that can shoot lots of photos in a burst, which requires more computer memory and yields a larger final image. Alternatively, you can break a single photograph up into squares and maneuver them as if they were separate prints. This is the approach I'll follow here, because it's easy to adapt it to collages of multiple originals. You may want to combine the two approaches and build your joiner from squares drawn from two or more originals. There are no rules.

A balloon festival is a great photographic subject, but look for any image with a wide angle of view.

Starting with the original image, create a new layer and fill it with white, then copy your original picture layer and move it to the top of the layer stack. Name the copied layer"Source." From the Layers palette, click the "Add a layer style" icon, and add a drop shadow and a thin, gray stroke. Click OK. You won't be able to see any visible difference, but it makes the next steps easier. Select the Marquee tool (M) and set its width and height to "500px" in the Tool Options bar. The "px" stands for pixelyou should adjust the value depending on what size "photos" you want. Select one part of the image and use Ctrl/Cmd + J to copy the selection into its own layer. You'll see that the new layer automatically has the same layer style as the Source. Activate the Source layer, and repeat step 4 as many times as you wish. At any point, you can review progress by switching off the Source layer's visibility. Your squares should overlap a bit. You will end up with lots of layers containing square sections cut from the main image. As the Layers palette can become quite unwieldy, gather layers into sets, which you can collapse or expand with a single click on the group's arrow. If you put the Source layer inside the group, all new layers created from the Source will also be added there. Keep toggling the Source layer's visibility and adding layers until the basic composition looks right. Deliberately leave gaps. When you're done, hide the Source layer.. Activate each layer, then select Edit > Free Transform or Ctrl/Cmd + T, and adjust the layer's position. You can rotate the images by dragging just outside the corners. Leave some layers alone, too. There is a fair chance that you will want to fine tune the drop shadow effect you added to each square in step 2. Or you may want to darken the edges of the square. Activate the first layer and add an Inner Glow layer style. Instead of repeating step 9 for each layer, right/ Ctrl-click your updated layer and select Copy Layer Style. You may then right/Ctrl click each layer and select Paste Layer Style. However, that's inefficient, and you may want to update the style again. In Photoshop CS2, you can select multiple layers using Shift-click or Ctrl/Cmd + click. In earlier versions you'll need to link the layers, then right/Ctrl click and paste the style to all at once. Once the layer styles are defined, you can fine-tune the position of the squares as much as you like. In a joiner, the eye jumps from one interesting detail to another, so the viewer's experience is more "staccato" than with a single image.