Multiple Exposure Photography
After looking at a lot of multiple exposure landscape photography, I decided that I would give it a go myself.
Step 1: find a subject with enough space around it that I could walk fully around it far back enough with my camera to get the shots I needed. I found the perfect tree in Kenny's Pond park.
Step 2: take the exposures. Unfortunately, my camera doesn't have an in-camera multiple exposure feature, meaning I had to manually take all of the photos and process them myself later. Here are the shots I got:
Step 3: layer and align the photos in photoshop. I imported them as a stack and turned down the opacity a bit with each layer. I kept the bottom photo 100%, the one above that 75%, and then I decreased the opacity of each layer by 5% as I went up through the stack. I also aligned each photo using the trunk of the tree as a base.
As you can see above, the blended image to the left looks a bit odd around the edges due to the scaling of my exposures. To the left is the original after reducing the opacity, and to the right is the cropped version.
Step 4: use of blend modes! I took my piece a step further by playing with the blend modes on each layer. I used a bit of a pattern for this. I started by using "screen" for the bottom image, "lighter colour" for the one above that, "soft light" for the next, and then "vivid light". I continued this pattern up the stack. When I finished, I went back and tweaked a couple to my liking- I used "linear dodge- add" for a few of them. Below is the version of my blended image with the blend modes.
Again, the version to the left is before the I cropped off the weird bits from the scaling. Cropped version to the right.
Below, I've compared the original blended exposures with just opacity changes and adjustments (left) and the later version where I experimented with the blend modes (right). Which version do you like best?
Thanks for reading!
-Tamara
