"Double" Exposure

Digital cameras are fun.  And the extent to which one can play and edit the photos on the computer is endless.  Which sometimes makes simple things from the days of film cameras boring.  Or even more fun and cool.


A double (or triple or ....) exposure on a film camera takes a lot of deliberate work.  It takes a special button. It's tedious to ensure that the subject is centered and fills the frame fully.  With a digital camera you know you can edit afterwards and crop properly or adjust lighting if necessary.


I had a vision for a double exposure - a flag blowing in the wind with a firework going off.  I grabbed my first photo, the flag.  Although the wind wasn't blowing, so I settled for dangling from the flag pole.  Then to get my next photo.  To get a full dramatic effect, I desperately wanted to get a firework at is exploded into a million pieces in the sky, as opposed to shooting straight up from the ground.  Well, those that shoot into the sky go so fast and I could never tell what kind of firework my neighbors were lighting, so I had to guess.  I missed them every single time.  Finally, with my camera on video mode, I managed to get a couple seconds of one going up into the sky and falling to the ground.  Then in Picasa I was able to snag a snapshot from it and superimpose it over my photo of the flag.  The following is the result:

I'm quite pleased with this as a first attempt at both fireworks and multiple exposure.  I'm anxious to improve my fireworks photography next summer.