One of my favorite things to do when I’m feeling creatively stunted is doing multiple exposures. More than that though, I really love getting a bit whimsy with it. For example, I’ll sometimes shoot a ton of photos over one another to simulate what it’s like to shoot an entire roll of film in a single frame. That tends to bring me a lot of joy because of how creatively chaotic the whole process is. But if you’re shooting multiple exposures, it can be really difficult at times to figure out how to do it right. If you’re trying to get a very specific look, like the iconic portraits that we all see, here’s a checklist of tips
- Use a studio setup to photograph the person
- Use a plain white background
- Get the subject and camera further away from the white background
- Make sure the white background is really overexposed and bright
- Get your subject to be very underexposed
- Save that image
- Go shoot a random pattern that appeals to you and tells a story about the person being silhouetted
- If you do everything right, the follow up photo will expose the darker area of the previous frame you shot. You can get very repeatable results this way.
Lots of cameras have multiple exposure modes with the only ones that don’t being Sony and Leica. But only older Canon models and newer LUMIX models allow you to also shoot RAW. Canon, with many of their newer cameras, took the feature to shoot RAW away with multiple exposure. It’s a great reason to hold onto the older Canon R5 instead of upgrading if you’re really into shooting stills vs video.
This can be very fun with Fujifilm cameras and Nikon cameras if you’re applying their film looks.
I encourage you to go try this method because otherwise, photography can get really boring and stale.