Multiplicity – Selfie’s with a Twist
In this time of worldwide lockdowns and #stayathome – amusing oneself is not easy. Read a book, clean the house, edit some images. Ok, what do we do in Week 2? Enter Multiplicity.
My original plan this week was to take a leaf out of Thomas Heaton’s book and try some macro at home. But after watching Chris Sale’s vlog on multiplicity (or as he called it, multiple exposure selfie), I decided to try that first. Apart from I would l have less mess to clean up – I could do it with minimal effort and no extra supplies.

Taking the Shots
You will need a camera, though a phone will work if you can put it on a tripod, but this post is cameracentric.
To take the images, I placed the camera on my tripod set to a waist-high height. Looking through the lens at 24mm, I couldn’t get everything in, so I swapped it out for the wide-angle and shot at 16mm. The entire image was taken in manual mode with autofocus. Because I didn’t want to use a flash, I also bumped the ISO to 800 with an F-stop of 9 to make sure everything was (reasonably) sharp. This gave me a shutter speed of 1/6 sec. Light isn’t great in the back room on an overcast day. It’s also important that you don’t move it between shots when you set the tripod up. Pick a location that will get all your planned shots in without repositioning the tripod.
I could have used the ten-sec timer – but chose to use my phone connected to the camera via wifi. The advantage of this is I could ‘see’ myself on the phone and set the shot up, then using the phone as a remote, take the image.
Overall, I took 5 images but ended up only using four as one of the shots almost completely obscured another one. I also changed my tops between shots to give a bit more interest. Be sure when you shoot yours, you allow space between yourself; as I mentioned, I lost a shot because one of me was standing in front of the other.
Editing Your Multiplicity
Once I had my shots, I downloaded them to the computer. From there are soooo many ways, you do it. I could be called lazy, but I prefer the term efficient. 😉 This is what works for me. I also worked solely in Photoshop, as I don’t use Lightroom. However, if you are a lightroom user, you can import them into Photoshop from Lightroom as layers.
- Once you have all the images open in photoshop, choose one that will be your base image. It doesn’t really matter which one is.
- go to the second image and hit Cntrl/cmd A then Cntrl/cmd C (this will select and copy the entire image)
- now go to your base layer and hit Cntrl/cmd V, and it should be pasted over the top of the base layer.
- On the adjustments panel, hit the little icon that looks like a Japanese flag
- this creates a mask over your image (it should be white) so choose a black soft brush to brush away the part of the image where you were in the bottom layer to reveal yourself. You should now have two of you
- repeat steps 2-5 with each of the remaining images
- when ‘all’ of you are there, flatten the image and edit as you would normally.
I enjoyed doing it – to the extent, I created another one the next day outside. Being in stage three restrictions with Corona Virus my front yard was as far as I dared go. It also required me to interrupt the dogs morning nap as I roped her in. Give it a go – and would love to see your results – just add a link in the comments section.
