Tutorial – How to Shoot a Double Exposure in Camera

With this free tutorial learn How to Shoot a Double Exposure in Camera.  Learn how to do a double exposure, a multi exposure in a canon dslr camera and have fun learning to do multiple exposure portraits! 

If you have a dSLR camera (whether nikon or canon) and you aren’t confident or familiar with your settings you may want to take a minute on this dSLR Crash Course first, just to familiarize yourself with some of the terms that will be used in this post.

Hi there! I’m Katherine Cobert of Cobert Photography. When Erin reached out to me about guest blogging for Sixth Bloom, I was completely shocked and honored.  We talked and decided I would blog about the photography technique – double exposure.  Here is a sampling of some double exposures using various techniques.  Follow me over on Instagram or Facebook

You can also find Katherine’s additional Double Exposure Tutorials here:

HOW TO MAKE A DOUBLE EXPOSURE PICTURE WITH AN IPHONE

Video Tutorial: How to Make a Double Exposure Picture in Photoshop

What I believe started as an accident – exposing the same film slide twice (by the camera malfunctioning and not advancing the film) – has now become a fun and artistic technique.  I honestly haven’t done a lot of double exposures.  Years ago, when I shot film, occasionally I would accidentally get a double exposure at the end of the roll of film.  It was never intentional though.  Fast forward to the last few years, I’ve only dabbled a bit with it.  My camera did not have the capability of doing double exposures, so I was left to do them with my iPhone or in Photoshop.  Only within the last few months did I upgrade my camera which now has the capability.  Let me tell you, in camera double exposures are the easiest, in my opinion, and quite addicting.

How to Shoot a Double Exposure in Camera

Now for the tutorial on how to create double exposures in camera.  I have a Canon 5D Mark III, so it may be a tad different depending on your camera.  For the 5D Mk III, there is a button to the left of the LCD screen.  It is a rectangle with a paint brush. Push that and a menu will pop up.  Scroll to the center option and click ok.

If you don’t have the 5D Mark iii, but still have the ability to take multiple exposures, you may need to go through your menu system to enable it.  It may be different from camera to camera, but I would assume it’s fairly the same when finding the “multiple exposure” option in your menus.  Go to the shoot menu (the one with the camera icon).  Scroll through until you see “multiple exposure”.  (Mine was found in the Shoot 3 menu.)  Click “set” and then it will take you to the same menu I referenced when using the side button.  Here is a picture for reference of where it is found in my menu system.

Another menu will pop up.  You’ll want to first enable the multiple exposure function (top option on the menu).  Make sure it is set to “additive”.  You can choose how many images you want to expose together.  For this tutorial, I will be doing 2.  Be sure to save all source images.  This will save both exposures individually as well as the image of them together as the double exposure.

If you want to make the double exposure by taking back to back photos that you are going to now take, you will scroll down to “On: Cont/Shtng”.  Otherwise if you want to choose your first image from one you’ve already shot, and then shoot your second image, scroll down to “On: Func/Ctrl”.  I’m going to do the second option as I already shot an underexposed image of a horse.

After you enable the double exposure function, it will take you back to the menu. Now the option to select your first image will be available.  Choose select, then scroll through your images to the one you want to use.  Press set, then scroll to click ok.

After you have done this, you can press your shutter button down halfway like you are going to focus.  The menu will go away.  Then, you will click the live view button (the “start/stop” button to the right of the eyepiece/viewfinder, make sure it is flipped to the camera, not video).  Now your first image will be on your LCD screen and you can compose your second shot via the LCD screen.

You can either manually focus your shot, or auto focus.  I tend to manually focus with double exposures.  Then click your shutter button.  It will take a minute to process.  Once the red light (on the side of your camera) goes off.  You can review your image to see how your camera processed it.

Here is my final image.

As you can see, there really isn’t much to it.  It’s quite easy. Be warned though – it is very addicting. As I said earlier, the possibilities are limitless.  Play around with your base image and your second image.  Play around with the exposure options as well.

I hope this tutorial has been helpful! Get out there and have fun creating some artwork! Once again, thanks so much to Erin for inviting me to guest blog here at Sixth Bloom!!