Learn about the Pep Ventosa Photography Technique

The tech­nique I am talk­ing about was made pop­u­lar by Pep Ven­tosa, a Cata­lan Pho­tog­ra­ph­er. His way of decon­struct­ing and re-assem­bling images leads to an impres­sion­ist image style, empha­siz­ing a com­mon object by merg­ing mul­ti­ple images. He does it in sev­er­al ways, one of them is ‘In the round’, and this is the method I tried to apply in my example.

Each spe­cif­ic sub­ject needs a unique approach, so you have to come up with a plan to shoot your images. Once you have done it a cou­ple of times, you will know what is impor­tant at the time of the image cap­ture, and what is not. Your cam­era is not impor­tant. I shot the images above with my Olym­pus OM‑D, but I actu­al­ly used .jpg images for the merg­ing as that was less resource inten­sive. You can shoot the images with your mobile phone, no prob­lem with that!

But you need to have some knowl­edge of an image post pro­cess­ing pro­gram which can han­dle lay­ers and blend modes between lay­ers. It doesn’t have to be Adobe Pho­to­shop, but it is cer­tain­ly a good choice.

When you take the images, think about the com­mon struc­ture you want to enhance in your image. Good sub­jects are things which can be shot from dif­fer­ent angles and do lose lit­tle of their shape while doing it. A tree is a good exam­ple, a lamp­post, I used let­ter box­es or cars successfully.

When you take your images, have the com­mon part in the same posi­tion of the frame every time, you lat­er need to align this part with all images. If you don’t do that, you might have to crop a lot for your final image, or you can’t use all images for the merg­ing. You’ll see lat­er what I mean with that.

Once you have your source images, import them into your post-pro­cess­ing pro­gram. Now comes the cre­ative fun part.