How to get creative with multiple exposures
Sometimes, one exposure just isn’t enough… give a new twist to familiar scenes and subjects by taking advantage of your camera’s multiple-exposure mode
Multiple-exposure photography has been around since the days of film, but it didn’t actually become a widespread feature in digital cameras until relatively recently. Even now, it’s not available on all DSLRs and mirrorless cameras – which is surprising, as it’s such a versatile facility.
You can use multiple exposure as a creative workaround tool, for example superimposing a shot of the full moon taken on a long telephoto lens on a scene taken with a wide-angle lens. With a fast shutter speed and a high-speed drive setting, you could record an entire sequence of an athlete in motion, with each of their different positions exposed in a single image. Alternatively, as we highlighted in our motion blur guide in the last issue, you can combine a series of images taken over a longer timeframe to recreate the effects of a single, much slower exposure to blur white water and clouds.
To create any of these effects, you need to access your camera’s multiple-exposure mode. This isn’t an exposure mode in the same way that Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority are: rather, it’s a creative option that is usually found in the camera’s menu. With this function enabled, you can use any of the more advanced exposure modes to take your multiple exposure, as you would with any other picture.
If your camera is capable of recording multiple exposures, you’ll find that there is a number of options