I only recently wrote about how long it takes to make a joiner, and then I went and did it all again. this one, of local beauty spot Farley Mount was made back in September. Except, this one took longer and had more source material than any other that I had made previously. In fact I shot almost six hundred frames in the space of an hour for this picture. I must have spent more than a day printing the cells, cutting them out building the foreground and then the sky, then recording the sequence and then building the digital composite in Photoshop.
individual cells printed 2" square, with camera number on back
start with the main landscape
add foreground detail
then build the sky
The completed layout
Building the joiner with small printed cells is fun and interactive. I find that making compositional choices is easier with physical photos than doing it in Photoshop. Once I've made the layout I turn the cells over one by one and record the numbers of the cell on a grid that matches the dimensions of the photo. I then use this for building the joiner within Photoshop. Each time I make a joiner I develop the method a bit further, to try to make the process easier and more repeatable. But that's for a future post.