Things Are Going To Be Getting Just A Little Bit Crazy!

I’ve recently developed a strong interest in impressionistic photographs using intentional camera movement (ICM) and multiple exposures. Of course, you can then take more than one multiple exposure or ICM image and blend them together in Photoshop. I thought I knew about making multiple exposures. If you’re like me, maybe you’ve made some multiple exposures using your digital camera in ‘average’ mode. But that barely cuts through the surface of what you can do. It turns out that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

First, there is the creative use of the ‘dark’ and ‘bright’ in-camera blending modes when making multiple exposure images. When using these modes, each image of the multiple exposure becomes like a layer in Photoshop and blends with the other layers in either the dark or bright blend mode (though you can only use one of the two modes in any given multiple-exposure series). In bright mode there is no averaging of the images, only the brightest pixels in any one area show through, and vice versa for dark mode. So, for example, if, in the bright mode, you imagine the pixels of each exposure stacked atop one another, the brightest pixel in the stack will be the only one that shows through on the final image. For example, if one of your images was a brightly overexposed piece of white paper, your final image would be just that, with none of the other images in the multiple exposure stack showing at all. That’s because every pixel in the overexposed white paper is brighter than any of the other pixels directly above or below it in the stack. If you had two images in the stack and one of them was an underexposed piece of black paper, and the other had a similarly underexposed black paper with a white stripe, the final image would be all black with a white stripe in it. Things get much harder to pre-visualize if the images aren’t black and white. Once you get multiple tonal values, things get much (much, much) more difficult to predict. But then again, some loss of control is really part of the beauty of the process. It gets even harder (and more interesting) if you over or under-expose certain of the images in the stack, altering their tonal values in comparison to the images that are correctly exposed.

You think that’s pretty wild? Here is where things really get to start crazy. In addition to the dark and bright modes, if you change the white balance during each of the shots of the multiple exposure, you get wacky color shifts. The bright mode tends to give you warm color shifts, and the dark mode cooler color shifts. Of course, you can change these colors in Photoshop as well.

For example, in the above image, there were no colors, just white and gray. It is literally a three-exposure multiple-exposure in bright mode of a white door with a gray wall around it. This image is essentially straight out of camera with just a bit of contrast added. How did all the weird shapes, lines, and colors get there? It is all a result of the bright mode letting certain pixels through to the exclusion of others above and below it and the effect of changing the white balance in bright mode for each of the three exposures. Pretty wild, right?! There are so many variables that can be changed, each giving you a different result.

View fullsize

© Howard Grill

A slightly different and more controllable approach is to combine images in Photoshop, making your ‘multiple exposure’ image in software (in reality, I will end up using both ways together). The image above is the result of combining several ICM photographs in Photoshop using different blend modes and color adjustments to obtain an abstract image. When I was putting the image together, I had visualized the warm colored center as something akin to the ‘Big Bang,’ but, in the end, I think it ended up looking more like the ‘Big Bug’ than the ‘Big Bang’ :)

Here’s the thing. It looks like it should all be easy, but, as it turns out, it really is quite difficult to get a visually pleasing result.

There will definitely be a lot of experimenting in the coming months, and I hope to improve my results with this kind of work. I should add that one of the nice things about this type of camera and Photoshop work is that you can make artwork without having to necessarily go far away and you can do it in any kind of weather. You just have to open your mind to what you can do with things around your home and neighborhood!

Get new posts by email:

Subscribe