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.

multiplicity
Multiplicity
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.

  1. 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.
  2. go to the second image and hit Cntrl/cmd A then Cntrl/cmd C (this will select and copy the entire image)
  3. now go to your base layer and hit Cntrl/cmd V, and it should be pasted over the top of the base layer.
  4. On the adjustments panel, hit the little icon that looks like a Japanese flag
  5. 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
  6. repeat steps 2-5 with each of the remaining images
  7. 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.

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© Bevlea Ross