Photography is one of the oldest types of visual art, with its popularity increasing each passing year, mainly due to the easiness of acquiring good, cheap cameras and pursuing the photography business. Since it’s been around for so many years, besides the technological advances it has taken advantage of, there have also been creative discoveries that took this art a step further.

One of those creative breakthroughs was double exposure photography, a skill that can really improve your portfolio and innovate the way you look into photography. Even though it’s a skill that requires a bit of experience and photo edition skills, the way you can tell stories, visually, it’s incredible. So, we should start by understanding what double exposure photography is!

What is Double Exposure Photography

Where in normal photography you focus on just one image, in double exposure, the idea is the symbiosis between various photos, usually two. Combining a picture, with less than full opacity, with another one, overlaying or superimposing them, you can reach a creative outcome – symbolic, complex, and stunning at the same time. This can be achieved in-camera (only available for some like the Canon 70D, 6D, most Nikon DSLRs, and the Olympus OM-D, among others) or in post-processing.

Different Techniques

With such a complex skill, like double exposure, there is a variety of different ways to go about it. Combining two pictures might seem simple in theory, but once you start reading about it, you might feel overwhelmed, so here are the most common paths you can follow:

Merging Two Faces

Imagine an old man’s face merged with a young one’s – a stunning way of showing the passing of time. Or an African woman with a caucasian one – a statement that skin color shouldn’t matter. Capable of producing strong messages with powerful symbolism, this technique focuses solely on portraits and can offer a large range of emotions, from comic to dramatic.

Here it is very important that both photos are similar in terms of lights and shadows, so the effect doesn’t seem too forced.

Silhouettes

Probably the most common style of double exposure, it consists of using an underexposed silhouette of a person, usually only a body part, and combine it with a well-lit background.  You can use a white backdrop for the portrait part, while some of the backgrounds that work the best are landscape photos, like an ocean, or a forest, with interesting textures.

Be it soft blurring or dramatic contrasts, you’ll want to experiment a bit in order to reach your desired outcome. This technique is also widely used in more artistic posters, for example, as you can see here.

Multiple Exposure Effects

If you’re trying to find a way to represent motion in still photography, multiple exposures can go a really long way. Imagine an Olympic sprinter, getting off his starting position and beginning his run, with various frames of his movements in the same picture. You can achieve this by taking a succession of rapid-fire photos, from the same spot, and overlaying them later. This way, you can imprint a movie in the audience’s mind, and really improve your portfolio.

Puzzle Pieces

This is where you can let your creativity grow some wings and fly high. Here, you don’t look at two photos and think how to combine them, with a simple opacity mask, but instead, you think: “How can they complement each other, connecting like two pieces of a puzzle?”

You can blend different parts of photos and reach outcomes like a woman with hair made of flowers, or an old man with legs made of an ancient tree trunk. You can also merge people with animals, creating analogies much louder than mere words.

Final Thoughts

The arduous times were double exposure had to be made, physically, on film, when revealing it, are long gone. With some trial and error, and a couple of hours watching youtube tutorials, you can really use this skill to your advantage and create amazingly stunning photos, capable of transmitting complex stories and truly elevate your portfolio to the next level. Best way to start? Go take some pics! Thanks for reading.