Double Exposure Photography

Photography Tips

Expanding your photographic horizon can force you to get more creative and think outside the box. One way to jumpstart your creative side is to experiment in double exposures. The style, which saw a rise in interest in part due to the popularity of Lomography, has been gaining more momentum lately, thanks the feature becoming standard on many popular DSLRs. Not to mention, you can get some really interesting images by exposing two photos on one frame. Below, Kai shares a few tips to get us started:

To take your own double exposures, you’ll want to overexpose the background of the first image. This allows the second exposure to appear on only the properly exposed areas in the first image.  For example, in the photo below, the first exposure is of the man posing against a backlit sky. The second exposure is of leaves, and you can see that the leaves only come through in the darker areas of the first exposure.

One more essential tip: to get one properly exposed double exposure, you’ll need to reduce the amount of exposure time for each shot. As Kai notes in the video, if the correct exposure is 1/500 of a second, then you will want to reduce that exposure time, shooting them both at 1/1000 of a second.