Multiple Exposures
by Carlos Davis

Photographers are lucky in that they have a wide range of special effects that can be used in their craft.  One such special effect is the method of multiple exposure.  This is accomplished by exposing the same frame of film with multiple images.  In the old days this would sometimes happen when the photographer forgot to advance the film after taking a picture.  With today’s modern cameras it is almost impossible to not advance the film after you take a photograph.  The challenge then becomes how to get the camera to make multiple exposures on the same frame of film.

Most cameras will have some option that will allow you to make  multiple exposures.  The Nikon F5, for example, has a push button located on the top of the camera that when pushed will not advance the film after an exposure.  You can also change the settings on the camera so you can make more than two exposures.  Some of the older mechanical cameras (e.g. Nikon FE2) allow multiple exposures by holding down a button while you rotate the film advance lever.  This cocks the shutter without advancing the film.  You will need to read your camera’s manual in order to determine what method you will need to use to take multiple exposures.



A mountain laurel in bloom on the trail to Sunset Rocks, Highlands, N.C. This shot is a double exposure with the second exposure taken after changing the focus of the lens to a point in front of the flower.  This technique produces the soft glow around the flower.

Another approach can be to shoot the whole roll of film, rewind leaving a tail of film out of the film canister, reloading the film into the camera, and finally taking the second photograph on top of the images that were created with the first pass.  This requires that the camera is able to reload the film the same way that it did the first time.  Good images can be created with this technique, however, it is best to shoot images where precise placement of image elements is not required.  An example of this is to take a set of photographs of the moon (on a dark night) where the moon is located in the upper left or right corner of the frame.  There should be no other object in the first set of images and you need to keep track of where you placed the moon in the image frame.  The second pass would be to now take photographs of buildings or mountains etc. where the second image can be placed in the blank area of the image frame.  You will want to avoid any object that would fall into the same image area as the moon image.  This technique can be used to place that “harvest” moon in any image that you want.

Of course you can take multiple exposures (two or more) at any time of any subject.  For example, a field of flowers exposed multiple times with the wind blowing will make it appear that there are more flowers in the field.  Another result can be had by taking the first image as a close up photo of a flower or group of flowers and the second exposure taken with the lens focused closer than the first image.  This will blur the second image and overlap it on the first image.  An example of this technique is shown in the mountain laurel photograph.

Digital camera don’t have a multiple exposure setting.  Here you must do your work in Photoshop or some other image editing software.  One method is to copy your image to another layer and then enlarge it using free transform and add a blur filter to it.  Then the two layers are blended using the Screen blending setting.  You then adjust the Opacity setting to get the effect that you want.

Exposure is determined by cutting the light in half for two exposures (-1 f-stop).  This same approach is taken for more than two exposures.  Just divide the exposure by the number of shots that you intend to make.  If the images are not overlapping then simply apply the exposure as you would normally.  If you want to use your automatic exposure mode in your camera, a quick way to get the correct exposure is to adjust the ISO setting of the film.  Shooting ISO 100 speed film adjust it to ISO 200 for 2 exposures, ISO 300 for 3 exposures, ISO 400 for 4 exposures etc.

For more photos go to www.clphotographics.com