Make a multiple in post

Mike Harris captures a street scene and duplicates it in post to create a finely tuned multiple exposure

- Mike Harris

In the October edition of N-Photo (issue 129), we featured Sara Jazbar’s stunning Confusion series of images in Your Stories, that was, in turn, inspired by the equally dazzling works of Belgian photographer Thomas Vanoost.

Sara revealed she overlays her multiple exposures in postproduction and, while there’s no right or wrong way to perform this age-old technique, digital editing software has afforded us the advantage of being able to fine-tune each and every aspect of our creations. The alternative is relying on your camera’s in-built multiple exposure mode.

Although this is perfectly capable of producing incredible images, you have to rely on the camera to process the final exposure and – unless you’re using the Z series’ Overlay Mode – the positioning of each exposure is left ever so slightly to chance, as you move the frame between shots with only your memory as a reference.

Our multiple exposure comprises three images and was created by duplicating the same image twice. The opacity of each duplication was reduced and layer masks were used to prevent them from obscuring the subject.