Hey there fellow P52ers, Lindsay here. We have a couple of really great lessons planned for you all this month, but with this being a new theme and a theme that isn't as commonly practiced, I wanted to give a quick overview to get you all started and hopefully answer some questions you may have (based on the questions I had when I first sat down to create my first diptych).
First, I want to start off by saying that there aren't really any rules to creating diptychs. I always assumed they were created by putting two portrait images cropped to the same dimensions side by side. I think this is what I most commonly see but really isn't a rule of diptychs, they can be side by side or one on top of the other. They can be the same (or similar) dimensions or varying dimensions. Really anything goes.
The first two diptychs I made (these two above to be exact), I used two images of varying POVs from the same series. I like this as a storytelling tool. It gives different perspectives to the scene while keeping a consistency in colors, setting, tones, etc. This seemed like an easy place to start.
Not too long after creating my first two diptychs, I wanted to explore a bit more with creativity and finding fun ways to create diptychs. I went searching through old images and had the idea to create an almost mirror image diptych. This idea sort of just came to me, but I was getting to the point where I wanted to shoot a little more intentionally to create a diptych from new images.
I started to look for ways to create diptychs using themes, colors, lines or geometry to tie the images together. For me, this takes quite a bit of trial and error. I have been exploring with color a lot lately and when I set out to do create a diptych of the same color, I walk around and shoot all kind of images with items of that color. It takes me a while of shooting and even more time pairing images together and trying all types of combinations and rotating and flipping images this way and that to find a pair that speaks to me.
I have several goals and ideas that I want to dive into and try when it come to diptychs. I feel like I am still relatively new to the technique but I have loved exploring and creating diptychs far more than I ever expected. I hope this short little lesson will help ease some worry or doubt you may have, maybe answer a question or two on the rules and what counts (pretty much anything goes), and hopefully give you just a glimmer of inspiration to try things out for yourself (if you haven't already). I know the lessons to come will dive in a bit deeper to this topic. I just urge you to experiment with pairings of old and new images and let your creativity fly. If you're in this group I know you already have the creativeness needed to create diptychs, now you just need to unleash it!
XOXO