The Genre I Kept Avoiding

For the longest time I had been sitting on the fence about double exposure photography — genuinely unsure whether I ever wanted to pursue it, or whether I should just keep avoiding it. The struggle was twofold: I didn’t know enough about the genre to feel confident diving in, and on top of that I had already seen so much incredible double exposure work on the internet that, I’m not going to lie, it intimidated me. When you set the bar that high before you’ve even picked up the camera, it’s easy to procrastinate.

Three Ways to Do Double Exposure (and a Fourth One Nobody Asked For)

These days there are several ways to actually approach double exposure photography, and I think it’s worth laying them all out before getting into my own experience, because the method you choose says a lot about what you’re trying to get out of it.

The first — and the one I’d consider the coolest — is doing it purely on film. You shoot a roll, rewind it, and shoot it again. That is exactly how I wanted to experience double exposure photography for the first time, and I’ll get into why that didn’t quite work out in a moment.

The second method is the in-camera digital approach. Most consumer-oriented cameras that lean a little gimmicky have this feature built in. You take the first shot, and the camera gives you a transparent overlay of it so you can compose your second shot on top. It’s probably the most accessible way to do double exposures, and it’s what I ended up using — though not entirely by choice.

The third method is Photoshop. You take two images, stack them in post, and blend them together. I’ll call this the safest way to do it, since you don’t have to nail it in camera – but can pretty much do whatever after the images are already taken – or might just use any old image you’ve lying around, or even an image you haven’t taken at all in the first place.

And then, with the rise of AI, there is now a fourth option: simply prompting an AI to generate a double exposure image. This could lead to genuinely incredible results, I’m sure — but like I said, film was always the one I wanted, and that’s where this whole project began.

The Failed Film Attempt

I had to cross film off the list very early in this project, and the reason was frustratingly practical: I couldn’t attach my flash sync receiver to my film camera. That realization hit while I was still in the preparation phase — I had already built up a backdrop in my living room studio, bought flowers, and was working out a system for marking frames on a roll of film so I could double expose the exact same frames twice with intention. The reality was though: the available light was disappearing too fast, I don’t own any old analog flashes, and if I wanted to use flash at all, I was going to need the digital camera (I mean, have you seen the prices of film these days, better not waste it).

In hindsight, this was probably the right call — even if it didn’t feel that way at the time. Looking back at the images now and remembering just how long it took to get them looking the way I wanted, I genuinely don’t think I would have achieved that result on film with my current level of experience. I needed to work through the process digitally first just to understand how much I don’t know about translating this kind of image to film.

The Digital Process — Not as Easy as I Expected

Switching over to digital did not magically make things simple. For these images I used my Canon R5, which is also my main camera for professional work. For the portraits of Anna del Rey — a model and colleague of mine based in Berlin — I used a set of Sigma Art lenses. For the close-up flower shots that I would later layer over the portraits, I switched to the legendary Pentax 105mm lens made for the Pentax 6×7, combined with a macro ring to get the detail I needed.

Working with two completely different lenses for the two layers turned out to be its own challenge. The workflow went like this: take the portrait with the Sigma lens at something like 50mm, which is well suited for portraits. Then, while the camera is still on and holding the first image in memory, swap lenses — which means the sensor is briefly unprotected during the switch, something I absolutely don’t recommend as a habit. Attach the Pentax 105mm with the macro ring, take the flower close-up, and let the camera combine the two.

Composing the second layer while looking at a transparent overlay of the first image on screen, while still struggling to understand, what was actually being how prominent in the finished picture was… surprisingly difficult:

Trying to focus fine flower details on top of a ghost portrait is tedious at best. A lot of the time it came down to finding roughly the right angle and pressing the shutter and hoping. And none of that accounts for the fact that the Pentax 105mm on the Canon R5 is a serious piece of glass — we’re talking somewhere around two to three kilos. Swinging that around by hand, swapping lenses back and forth, holding it up for extended periods — it gets heavy fast. So right from the start, the digital approach turned out to be considerably less effortless than I had expected.

Exposure and Flash: The Biggest Brain Twister

This was where I saw the most creative potential in the whole project, and also where I had to think the hardest. There were two things I didn’t fully understand going in: how the Canon R5 actually combines the two exposures, and how flash power would interact with layering.

On the first point — I still don’t have a completely clear picture. From my experience so far, it seems like the camera tries to balance the two images regardless of how much you overexpose one of them, rather than simply stacking whatever you give it. This matters because on film you can calculate, roughly, that exposing the first frame lighter will make it appear as a subtler layer in the final image. In-camera, the logic isn’t quite the same, and I had to learn that through trial and error rather than any clear documentation.

On the flash side, things got complicated quickly. I was only working with two layers — the portrait and the flowers — and I wanted one to be clearly more dominant than the other. Specifically, I had a very clear image in my head of what I wanted the final result to look like. What I didn’t have was any idea how to actually produce it. So it became a long process of adjusting flash intensity between the first and second shot, changing shutter speed, and making notes in my head that I then forgot, because I didn’t write any of it down — a mistake I’ll get to.

The metadata wasn’t going to save me either. When the camera combines two images into one file, it only stores the exposure data for one of them — either the first or the second — not both. So reconstructing what settings produced what result after the fact is basically impossible.

By the end of the session, my best working approach had settled into something like this: a flash strong enough to cleanly illuminate the white backdrop, plus a key light that created a relatively neutral to slightly dramatic portrait in the first exposure. For the flower layer, a well-lit image that preserved as much detail as possible. The goal was for the final merged image to read more as texture than drama — and when it worked, it worked well. But getting there took a lot of back and forth.

Editing in Darktable — Why a Free Tool Beat a Paid One

Once I had the images, I tried two editing approaches. First I went to Darktable, felt like I couldn’t quite get where I wanted to go, and switched to Adobe Lightroom (the grass is always greener…). Then I quickly realized I also wasn’t going to get where I wanted in Lightroom either.

One major editing hurdle for me was the background. My original intention was to shift the white backdrop to a neutral grey tone. Neither Darktable nor Lightroom could do this cleanly, and the reason is that these double exposure images contain such a complex mix of tones and colors that trying to push the whites toward grey ends up pulling everything else with it. The technically clean solution would have been to cut out the background and replace it with a grey one — but that would have gone against my whole philosophy for this project, which was to interfere with the image as little as possible. So I kept the white background and moved on.

With that decision made, I went back to Darktable — and this time I stuck with it. Darktable simply gave me more precise control over the different brightness layers within the image, and finer contrast adjustments than Lightroom was offering me and voilà, with a bit of tweaking I ended up with a background I liked.

The ability to work through tonal ranges in detail made a real difference for images this complex. Here is a before and after edits using especially the tools color balance RGB, color balance, color calibration and tone equalizer… and color equalizer… and all of them do different things… it might not be the easiest program, admittedly, but it’s a lot of fun discovering everything you are able to tweak:

Just as a sidenote: I’ll still have an adobe subscription running and yet, Darktable has actually become my main editing tool now — it’s the program that replaced Lightroom for me entirely: Better performance, more stable, more detailed workflow, and I’ll be writing a dedicated article about that at some point, because there is genuinely a lot to say about it (one of these things being, that it is not for everyone).

The editing itself took significant time. Fine-tuning the contrast, working through the color layers, coaxing the detail out of the flower textures — it was careful, slow work (and that made me feel a little better about not shooting the whole project on film).

The Results and What I Actually Liked

Not every image made it to the final cut, of course. A lot of the flower close-ups were slightly soft in the wrong places, and in some cases I wasn’t happy with the flower textures I had chosen or the way they were positioned against the portrait.

But the ones that worked — I actually like quite a lot. I’m happy with these results. And looking back on what made the strongest images, one thing stood out clearly: the shots where I had genuinely tried to wrap the flowers around specific areas of the portrait, focusing on one region rather than trying to cover the whole frame, were consistently the best. Intention in composition made a visible difference, even in images that were partly assembled by feel and guesswork.

Conclusion and What I Would Do Differently Next Time

This was a genuinely fun project, and more than that — it was the kind of project that reminded me why I love creative experimentation in the first place. I stumbled around in the dark not knowing what I was doing, and I get that feeling quite rarely these days… maybe next time I’ll add that film factor to the mix and move from stumbling in the dark to getting lost in a bunker during a blackout.

But for these images specifically, I’m glad I worked through the digital process first, because I needed that learning experience before I could even properly understand what I’d be trying to achieve on film.

For the next shoot, here is what I would change. I would work with a larger softbox to illuminate the backdrop more evenly. I would think more carefully about how to frame and hold the flowers during the second exposure — maybe even build a simple rig to position them more precisely rather than holding them by hand. And I would prepare a cheat sheet before the shoot: take test shots of the flowers or objects first, dial in the exact flash settings and exposure values needed to get the layer strength I want, and write it all down. That way I know exactly what I’m working with before the model is standing there waiting.

Speaking of which — Anna powered through all of this with a lot of patience, and I want to acknowledge that. The number of times a lens didn’t fire, or something was misaligned, and she just kept standing there holding the flowers in position — that was genuinely impressive. Next time I’ll make the whole experience considerably smoother for whoever is on the other side of the camera.

This is also my second blog post about boudoir and fine art photography. It’s a direction I’ve been slowly trying to find my footing in over the years, and I still wouldn’t say I’m fully comfortable in it — but maybe this gets me a little closer, especially when it comes to producing this kind of image with real creative intent behind it. Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope you got something out of it, and I’ll see you in the next one.