I've been wanting to try a double exposure for a while now, and this challenge came right as I was both happy with my Free Study XII results and frustrated by the next few challenges after it.
Showing me both smiling and screaming seemed like a good combination for this challenge. I also figure there will be a zillion black and white high contrast shots, so I'm trying one in color.
The hard part was figuring out the lighting, since I don't own any flashes. Instead, I used both the A620 and the S2 IS. I set the S2 IS to a 15s exposure and put the flash on "second curtain," meaning the flash would go off at the end of the exposure. I also set the focus and exposure manually and locked them.
Then I set the A620 to a 7-second delay.
After playing with various settings and positions, I got the results I wanted by setting the S2 IS flash to minimal power and the A620 to max., with the A620 only about a foot from me and the S2 IS about 4 feet away.
I put a stool in the middle and marked two spots for my hands for the different poses.
The background is a piece of blue posterboard on the left, taped over a piece of black posterboard on the right. I tried several shots with white and black, but figured this would let me use selective color more easily. I was wrong, of course. ;) Didn't realize selective color had a "whites" option. Oh, well.
For each shot, I pressed each shutter down halfway to get the cameras ready, then pressed them fully, stood in front of the blue background and smiled, waited for the A620 flash, then swung around the stool and stood in front of the black background.
After a few test shots to figure out the flash/camera position combination, I took about 5 positioning shots and 30 actual posed shots.
Much playing around with adjustment layers led to this final version.
I actually expected the left pose to be a "ghost" image, because the white background was exposed twice: once with me in front by the A620's flash, and once with me over the black background with nothing in front of the white. And in the original, the left pose is a ghost. But the processing ended up making it solid.
Voters will probably say it's too much editing, or that the left pose is too bright, but I like the way it turned out. After all, it's a high contrast challenge!
Anyone post-challenge want to help me figure out where it went wrong? I'd really appreciate it! Here's the original:
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