Margaret D. Andrews
Deliberately planned, double exposure shooting can produce exciting results. You can achieve all kinds of rare, odd, distorted, funny, and mysterious pictures by incorporating people, animals, and other elements in the most unexpected places and situations.
Double exposure shooting means exposing your unit of film twice or more for one photograph. Many of the current cameras provide for double exposure, but some don’t. In either case, consult your camera’s manual. If no instructions are given, try this: push the rewind button (usually on the bottom of the camera). Turn the rewind crank, in the direction of the arrow, to rotate a full 360 degrees. Wind the shutter for the second exposure while holding the rewind crank to prevent slipping. You can shoot two or more exposures. A different f-stop or shutterspeed may be used for your second (or third) exposure. The additional exposure could be a close up of a detail or, by backing away, a smaller image. Try to visualize what you want the multiple images to look like and how one will fit with another on the same frame.
Another multiple exposure experiment uses an opaque mask to cover half the camera lens (an old lens cap with half cut out works well). The cap or mask is adjusted so that when you look in the viewfinder you see only half the viewing screen. Mark the position of the cap or mask with white pencil or a tiny edge of tape on the lens barrel. Make the first exposure. Now make the second exposure. The whole film frame is now covered by the two separate exposures. This is the way to have the same person appear twice in one picture. Using the camera’s self timer and a tripod, that person could be you. To work well, be sure the half mask fits close to the lens, or the joining of the two halves will not mesh. There are filters available that make this easy to do.