My Obsession With Double Exposures
The Quest For The Perfect Image
As the title suggests, I’ve had a love affair with double exposures since I first started photography in 2012. The film revival was just starting to come about and Lomography as a movement was beginning to build a sizeable community around creative ways to shoot film.
A double exposure occurs when 2 images are captured onto a single frame of film. This commonly occurs when the film advance lever isn’t working properly and the resulting image is either partially or fully exposed multiple times.
These frames are usually set aside or discarded but over the years people have begun to realise (either through happy mistakes or experimentation) that there’s a real creative potential to this method, so much so that’s it’s also very common to have a multiple exposure option in most modern digital cameras nowadays.
The majority of these older film cameras don’t have a dedicated multiple exposure function so the trick to getting the negative to stay in place (rather than advancing) was to hold the rewind button whilst turning the advance lever on the camera. This would load the shutter to fire without moving the negative after the first shot was taken.
I stumbled upon a forum of other budding photographers trying their hand at double exposures and after some trial and error I made my first multiple exposures on my Pentax ME Super.
They weren’t much to look at but I was captivated by the way the different images worked together to create something greater than the sum of it’s parts. A new feeling or a meaning, and I was determined to get better.
I discovered that the key to creating compelling double exposure images was to understand how the shadows and highlights of each frame would interact with each other. After the first photo is imprinted on the film negative the second photo pierces through the denser, more underexposed areas of the negative. This meant I had to be incredibly intentional with my composition, almost storyboard the entire image before I even picked up the camera.
I’d recruit my friends and my family to stand still for me as I took backlit silhouette images of them for my first shot, I’d then capture a high contrast scene for my second shot. This would make for an ethereal sort of portrait where the subject takes on a sort of transparency, a ghost like effect which can create some really interesting results.
I think one of the main reasons I loved this style of photography so much was because I wasn’t able to instantly see what I had created. I’d make the multiple exposure in the camera but then I’d have to wait days, weeks or even months before I got to see the results.
I’d imagine 10 different versions of how the final image would look before I received my prints or scans back from the lab. By the time they finally arrived I’d either be presented with something that was greater than I’d imagined or a dud that would force me back to the drawing board to analyse what went wrong.
Of course I wanted to improve my compositions but ultimately it was just fun to shoot these sorts of images and that’s what photography is all about.
Looking back at these images reminds me of the importance of being playful. Pursuing anything creative inevitably leads to some form of burnout, so changing things up and trying something new is a great way to gain new perspective and find new avenues for enjoying your craft.
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