Multiple Exposure Photography Image of a Shropshire Tree and a Slovakian Forest!

I loved making my autumn orange collection which some of you may have caught on my instagram account. Even though the images didn’t have birds in them I had such a good time using a Slovakian forest image that I took a few years ago. So I thought I would share with you how they were made and what layers I used - apart from the forest. Having just had two days of snow, and the outrage of having to go to ‘my other work’ and not being able to photograph it I also thought this was a good time to inject some warmer colours into our lives.

All of the images stem from the one below. It’s one that I loved the light and when I was not quite taking all multiple exposures I entered it into a few competitions. Now, further into my photography I can see why but at the time it made me a little frustrated as it meant a lot to me. It was a blue skied autumn day in October in North Eastern Slovakia and I was roaming around looking for UNESCO World Heritage wooden churches. The day was such a lovely one….I think we all have photos like that and sometimes it can be hard to separate the sentimental meaning from the image itself.

The other exposures I used in the top image are below. I injured myself (falling off a horse of all things!) in the most orange part of the autumn and so the gold was a way of recapturing what I should have been photographing!

A Multiple Exposure Photography Image of reeds (with a Slovakian forest in the background!)

I thought I would experiment with different subjects even if they weren’t properly autumnal. Even though I took the picture of this reed just before sunset at Hengistbury Head on the South Coast in the middle of the summer - with the two other exposures I still think it does transport you to a different place - maybe October? I found that whilst I I was using a fairly complicated exposure such as the forest my main subject needed to be fairly simple to enable the careful positioning of the sparkles. I also added a sunset sky into this image for a even more diversity in the oranges.

In order to keep a flow throughout the collection I used a couple of blend modes the same as well as the base exposures. I used fairly strong blend modes in this one: linear burn, overlay and soft light (which isn’t that soft!) Using a different blend mode on each layer gives the diversity that pulls out the right colours and patterns that I want to show. Obviously sometimes this doesn’t work at all - I tend to go for a maximum of about 20 minutes with an image and if it hasn’t got anywhere by then, it’s never gonna!

Below is my sunflower image which I added an extra ingredient….

A Multiple Exposure Photography image of an autumn sunflower

Sunflowers are not obvious subjects for an autumn series however when I put this up on my social media I did have a woman comment that she had planted her sunflowers late and so they were flowering whilst I was posting this collection. So autumn sunflowers are a thing! I wanted a bit opf something extra with this image and so after the paint and the forest I added a little bit of Croatian sunset sea - I mean, why wouldn’t you!?

Many clients on my courses ask how I choose things to go together and I have to say that sometimes I have a firm idea, in this case it was important to have the forest in all of them, but in other cases it is not so clear cut. I will wander through various collections until I find something that might add the extra look I was going for. In this case I have never used the water image before but it has been in my ‘textures folder’ for ages!

If you have enjoyed this article please do give it a comment and I hope that it inspires you to create something bright and warming, and that you can immerse yourself in it. If you haven’t already do sign up for my FREE newsletter here and if you fancy having a go at some of these techniques in camera or one of my online courses then do have a look here and do get in touch with any queries:

Below are some of the other images from this series.

Inspirations: How I created my Multiple Exposure Autumn Orange series…..

How to: Use Double Exposure Photography in Gig Images

How to: Use Snapseed for Multiple Exposure