I went for another walk last week at Orlando Wetlands Park with Tom M.  It was a pretty morning and in addition to the normal bird suspects, we also saw Soras, Purple Gallinules, and heard reports of Bald Eagles and many Black Crowned Night Herons.

In this post though, I want to discuss compositing.  Wikipedia says:

“Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene.”

Multiple exposures are a subset of compositing, and are much easier to produce in today’s world of digital photography.  In addition to creating an illusion, they can be used to show things that are difficult for a camera to capture in a single frame and better show reality.  Examples are panoramas, focus stacking, HDR, etc.

There’s a lovely Pink Trumpet tree on the west side of the main path into the park.  It’s in bloom and that morning the moon was setting behind the tree.  This snap from my iPhone shows how the tree looked against the sky and moon.

I wanted to isolate one bloom with the moon and clouds behind it, but the depth of field with my telephoto lens was too shallow to show both in the same frame.  So I made two,  with one focused on the flower and the second on the clouds / moon.  Then in Photoshop it was relatively easy to combine the two frames to show what I wanted.

Moon, clouds, and flower

Here’s a second example:

Ibis flight sequence

This one is from a sequence of a single White Ibis flying by in a little under 2 seconds.  I brought all 25 frames into Photoshop on separate  layers and aligned them.  Then I used the focus select function to mask the birds from each layer into a single composite.  I ended up having to omit every other frame to avoid overlapping birds.

If you’re willing to dive into Photoshop or any other image editing software that offers layers and masking, you can do the same sort of work.  Think about techniques like these when you’re out photographing.  If you capture the source frames you need when you’re out, then when you get back to your computer you can use them to solve problems and enhance your creativity.

Thank you for stopping by and reading my blog. Now, go make some multiple exposure photos!

©2017, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved