Double Double

Boil and trouble! Want a milkshake with that? Double jointed, double meaning, double whammy, double duty, double take, double decker — sometimes two is twice as nice, especially when it comes to double exposures. 

If all things zombie prove any point, it's that just when you think a fad is dead, it can last another 10 years, easily. Of course, double exposures have been around for ages — the result of happy accidents when developing film. But if my Instagram feed and blog habit accurately reflect today's trends, double exposures are going off the rails right now. And fortunately, they are fairly easy to create in Photoshop. 

After following several different tutorials, I realized that there are about as many methods to create digital double exposures as there are photographers in the world. The first one I tried my hand at was my own profile, messing with the layer options until I could get my tulips to show through just right. It's nice and ghosty, and I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. The others, however, did not respond as well to this method, so I simply used the "screen" blending option to get them in ship shape. There are much more complicated things one can do with double exposures, of course, but I'm happy with this as a starting point.

As I had to delve into a bit of stock photography (for the water, stars, and landscape images), this gives me great incentive to go forth into the world and photograph a whole new range of things, like textures, patterns, and nature scenes. And, it gives me a whole new appreciation for photographing subjects against a plain background; selecting a (fairly) clean, crisp version of my sunflowers was a labor of love, what with sky, grass, and leaves everywhere! 

My little quartet here reminds me of the (not-doubly exposed, but still iconic and amazing) cover of Fleetwood Mac's Rumors, which is basically an image I'd like to hop inside and spend the rest of eternity in. So if I can get one baby step closer to creating something even remotely like that, my work for the day is done.