What you need: Smartphone, tripod, GIMP Time required: One hour
Photographs usually capture a single moment in time, but that doesn’t always tell the whole story. If you want to present before and after shots, illustrate how something’s grown or show off the results of your handiwork, it can make more sense to create a composite shot: a single frame that contains two or more images, laid one on top of the other, and cropped.
We sometimes use these in the magazine when we want to illustrate the effect of making changes to software or hardware. We did so recently in our feature on calibrating your monitor and printer to make sure the colours you see on screen are accurately reproduced on paper (see Issue 685, page 36). Here’s how we usually go about producing a composite image.
1 Mount your phone on a tripod
If you have very steady hands and you’re shooting the two images in quick succession, you can do this freehand – especially if you’re happy to spend more time lining everything up in an image editor afterwards. That said, for the best results we’d recommend using a tripod.
Tripods come in all shapes and
