Tonight I wanted to play around with "multiple exposures" a bit. They aren't true multi exposure because they are not done in camera, but then again with digital what does in camera mean? As soon as the camera reads the light on the sensor, it's being manipulated, so I guess it could be argued that doing layering in Ps is like doing multiple exposures.
I should probably explain multi expos a bit. They are when you combine two or more images into one frame. Traditionally, they are done by making two exposure on the same frame of film, or enlarging two images on one sheet of paper in the dark room.
When combining images, it's all about getting the right exposure. Together, the images have to equal correct exposure. So if they're two images, each would have to provide 50% of image data, or 60/40, etc. The more images there are, the more under exposed each has to bed. That being said, each part of each image will have different areas of light and dark. A window will be brighter than the surrounding room for example. When you combine images, if you have two bright areas over top of each other, it's going to blow out that part of the image. Same goes for two very dark areas, they're going to come out still dark. So you have to think about how much you are going to under expose each image as well as how the images are lined up with each other.
Luckily, in digital land you really don't have to worry too much about that. Everything can be manipulated later.
Tonight, I just wanted to try something basic and easy to make sure I got the hang of it.
I started out by shooting my hand in front of the computer screen. My hand is very underexposed, and the screen is very bright. This leaves an area of low image data to put something in, and a bright area that I don't have to worry about messing with. In Lr, I bumped the contrast up a lot to really make darks black and the monitor as bright as I could. In Ps, I even cut out the hand and filled the monitor in with complete white.
The next image was of a spoon thing. I under lit it under my desk with my Maglit. I pointed the light strait up, then just caught the light in the spoon and shot away. This made the background very dark compared to the spoon thing, which worked out great for laying.
In Ps, I used the lighten blending mode to composite everything. The light areas of the spoon photo, which was only the spoon, showed through the darker areas of the hand photo. I positioned the spoon just inside the hand, as if to say that hand are for one purpose. Eating food. Which is really what they are for, right?
I didn't do much in Lr after that, just convert to b/w and that's it.
This was really a test photo that turned out pretty cool. I'll probably experiment with this more often, maybe with some portraits or something.
See you tomorrow!
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