Double Exposure

Inspired by a video and article about the work of street photographer Tom Baumgaertel I thought I would play around with the creation of ‘in-camera double-exposures’ and a visit to the Cute exhibition at Somerset house seemed as good a place as any to play with this method of image creation.

Baugartel’s work typically revolves around street photography and he uses sunset and nighttime to cue up silhouetted figures in his first exposure that he then wraps in shape and light with the second exposure. The result is a moody and somewhat graphic use of light and colour.

Baumgaetel, T (2023) www.instagram.com/bewaremyfuji/

The double exposure process in the Fujifilm cameras allows for up to 9 images to be overlayed but for my initial experiments I only did two or three. There are limitations to the process and it’s a little unpredictable at first. If anything I felt like I was just pushing the button and the camera was doing all the work.

As with anything new the first images were terrible, over exposure seems to be the main issue so stopping down each frame seemed to bring things under control.

As with Baugartel’s work mixing a mono-toned image with colour seems to work well as in this portrait of my daughter mixed with the design on her t-shirt shows.

Cranefield, R (2024), Untitled Double Exposure

In the exhibition a lot of the subject matter was quite flat and whilst double-exposures rendered some interesting images they looked more like photocopied mashups than original photographs.

The best results again were found when bending a 3D first image with a neon or textured second image…

Cranefield, R (2024). Untitled Triple Exposure

..such as this photo of a lot of Hello Kitties, a neon sign, and a textured mirror wall.

None of today’s creations were ground breaking but the process is interesting and I’ll experiment further. Right now the camera seems to be in control, generating weirdness out of the things I feed it. Further practice is needed to get to a place where I am using the tool to realise a vision rather than just seeing what happens.