From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Portrait project: Double exposure shot - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

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Portrait project: Double exposure shot

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- Hey welcome back to Mobile Photography Weekly. I'm Sean Duggan. This week we're going to take a look at making a double exposure portrait. Now you've probably seen examples of this around where the subject is blended with either a landscape or sometimes a city scape element. If you set it up right, they're actually pretty easy to do. The key to making it work is choosing the right backdrop. Now what I like to do is use either a white or a very light background, or a black or a very dark background. Using backgrounds that have that tonal extreme of either white or black, meaning it's going to very easy in a compositing app to drop in other elements into those areas. It also is pretty important that the background be very uniform and uncomplicated. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is you don't have to have any special backdrop gear to do this. You can use elements that you just find in your surroundings. So we have this nice white van here and we're going to use that as our white backdrop. So what I'm gonna do is take a couple shots of Zack here and I'm gonna do a wide view and also little bit of closer in view so that I have more flexibility in terms of the compositing. So give yourself options. Alright Zack, so what I want you to do is I want you to look out kinda in this direction right here. That looks good. And maybe can you step this way just a little bit? There we go. I wanted to get that seam of the door outta the way. So the only thing I'm gonna do here. I've got some beveling on the side of the van. I'm gonna to overexpose the white. So I want my exposure to be for my subject, not for the side of the van. But the way that the camera is interpreting the white is it's wanting to make it a little bit darker. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tap here to set the exposure there and then I'm gonna come up a little bit and you can see how it's getting brighter there. And that's a little bit too bright there. His forehead's getting a little bit too bright. That's good. (camera click) And I'm gonna go to my portrait lens cause that's gonna make a little more flattering view of the subject. (camera click) And go ahead and look right at me Zack. (camera click) Great. And then lets have one where you're kinda looking off this way. Oh yeah that one's good, like that. Okay. (camera click) And little bit more that way, turn your head there. Alright, that's good. And so I'm taking several here with a different arrangement of how much of the white background is on either side of him. So, in terms of blending these together, in compositing apps, you'll often find blending modes. And the blending modes that work best, for whether you're using a white or black background, are gonna be multiply or screen. So if you have a white background, the multiply blend mode will show only the darker parts of that. If you have a black background, you can use the screen blend mode to show the lighter parts of a subject. We're going to be going into how that's accomplished in next weeks episode.

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