Multiple Exposure Blend - Action Photography

Multiple Exposure Blend:

© Ankit Gajjar - All Rights Reserved

Multiple exposure blending is a common trick used by many action photographers. In my case, this was the most action I could find during the weekend. 

Making a multiple exposure image is fairly straight forward as long as you follow some simple camera settings.

1. Set your camera to manual. Do not use any of the preset or auto modes. This is to avoid any metering changes. Since the subject will be moving the meter in your camera may get confused and adjust the shutter speed or aperture. Therefore manual mode would keep these two settings consistent.  
2. Make sure you have a high enough shutter speed 1/100s+. In this case I had the shutter speed set at 1/125s, aperture at f/11 (wide enough aperture to make everything in focus). However to achieve the desired settings you may need to bump up the ISO.
3. Set your camera to continuous shutter. In my case I set the 7D to high speed continuous shooting (8 frames per second). The sequence I shot had 14 pictures, I selected only the pictures where the subject was spaced apart from one shot to the other (therefore dropping the count down to 5 shots in this case).
4. Set your white balance to anything other than auto. In my case I set it to daylight. This is important because we don't want the white balance shifting as the subject moves from shade to sunlight. 
5. Figure out the path of the subject and make sure you have allowed enough space in the frame to capture the final shot of where you expect the subject to be in the final sequence shot. In this case I had the subject perform a sample run and this allowed me to set the "zoom" so I could capture the start and end of the sequence without moving the camera.
6. Preferably use a tripod. This is important since we don't want the entire scene to shift during every exposure. However, if you do not have a tripod at the moment of the scene, try to be rock steady when shooting the sequence, or place the camera on a steady object. In my case I did not have a tripod, so I remained as steady as possible during the entire sequence of shots, however I did have to align all images in Photoshop.
7. Finally your set to capture the sequence and edit in Photoshop, take the desired shots. Load them to a photo editor that has masking capabilities. I used Photoshop and put all 5 images as layers, then simply masked out the subject in each picture except for the final shot (the last shot in the sequence) which you will have to set as your background layer. Once the subject is masked out in all the images, inverse the masks (ctrl + I) on all the layers- this will allow only the subject to be scene in each of the pictures. Once this is done you should be able to see a similar sequence as the one above. Then merge layers and viola done. 

Thank you for reading my blog. If you have specific questions or need help with specific topics please post in the comments section below.

Thanks,

AG