John Gerlach Loc: Island Park, Idaho

Hi Everyone,

I would like to share a technique that I find incredibly useful, but remains largely unknown. I commonly use multiple exposure for various purposes, but it does solve one problem I have had really well. I like to shoot night skies where I must focus on the stars, but I also want a foreground in focus. How can you do this in-camera and get both areas in sharp focus? And how can you shoot the foreground at f/13, but use f/2.8 for the stars in the sky? A couple years ago, when encountering this problem yet again, I wondered what I could change between two shots of a multiple exposure. I found I could change the focus, f/stop, shutter speed, white balance, but not the ISO. Now I routinely do this to sharply record and expose the foreground and the background and do it all in the camera. It has profoundly changed how I think about shooting images, so I hope some of you will find this technique useful. Here are a couple of northern lights images I recently shot over Lake Superior using the technique.

I finally got some northern lights over Lake Superior. I used Elliot fall that is found on the east side of Miner's Beach in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore as my foreground. Predictions were great for the lights, but dense clouds and a strong north wind at dusk eliminated my chances. Not to quit, I set my alarm for 1 am and it was calm and clear then. So I drove to Miner's Beach to look for the lights - and it wasn't hard to see them as their glowing lit the way through the forest. Though the wind had subsided, the waves were still rolling in. Eliot fall is right on the beach and the waves touch it. At times, I felt like I was a peanut in a room full of chipmunks, as the waves chased me around on the slippery sandstone, but I managed not to fall.
Once I got my composition using a headlamp and flashlight in the dark night at 2 am, I set the camera to about f/13 for some DOF and lit the fall with a flashlight. I used Cloudy WB, focused on the rock manually using live view where the water plunges off, and shortened the exposure to about 8 seconds to eliminate any possibility of the night sky and northern lights appearing in the background.
I shot several images until I got one where my light painting with a flashlight was pleasing to me. Though I am adept at flash, I did not want to use it here as that would freeze the falling water and I wanted it to blur so I used the weak continuous light source of a flashlight. Once I got the waterfall image I wanted, I then focused to infinity for the stars as best I could, changed the white balance to 3800K so the night sky would not be too warm in tone, changed the shutter speed to about 25 seconds, and opened up the aperture to about f/3.5. Activating my in-camera multiple exposure option, I selected the image of the waterfall I liked to be the first of a double exposure. My Canon 1DX Mark II copies the file, and then it is a simple matter to shoot the second exposure of the northern lights. I did this sequence repeatedly as the northern lights change in size and intensity over time. Two hours later, this frozen photographer crawled off the slippery rocks and made the 300 yard trek back to the truck. It was well below freezing, and shooting by myself, I was well aware that falling and breaking something could easily be fatal, so I was as careful as I could be.
Early in the morning, the crescent moon was floating in the eastern sky, so I selected the double exposure result I liked best to be the first of another double exposure, used a Canon 200-400mm lens with the 1.4x making it a 560mm focal length, set the exposure for the crescent moon, turned my life view on so I could see the image that I would be adding the moon to, focused using a magnified live view image, and shot it into the scene. I realize the moon rises in the east and the northern lights are in the north, but I call it poetic license.
I post this to share the northern lights with you and to suggest you might want to look at your multiple exposure options more closely if your camera offers it. Did you notice I could change the focus point, white balance, f/stop, and shutter speed from one image to the next? That opens up a whole world of possibilities! I cannot change the ISO, though, or I would have used ISO 400 for Elliot fall, and then switched to ISO 3200 for the sky.
I think there is a good chance for more northern lights tonight too. Check you northern light alert web sites, and good luck.


Elliot Fall on the East side of Miner's Beach - moon shot two hours later when it rose above the trees using in-camera multiple exposure


Elliot Falls as northern lights danced in the distance

Dr.Nikon Loc: Honolulu Hawaii

John .., ALOHA .., thnx for sharing your technique ... this will help a lot of the hogs .....I like your shot ...and the effort put in to get it ...

rdubreuil Loc: Dummer, NH USA

Thanks for sharing, sounds like an awesome technique, will certainly give it a go. Your images turned out great.

martinfisherphoto Loc: Lake Placid Florida

With Nikon as fas as I know you can only do multiple exposures back to back. You cannot search thru your card, pull an image up and then expose over top of that one.. If I'm wrong, please someone point this out.. I'm not entirely sure if cannon can do this as well. Again, if I'm wrong please experience canon users point this out, as I love to learn new technics.

rdubreuil Loc: Dummer, NH USA

No you're correct, must be done during the multi exposure process. Depending on the Nikon model one can do up to 9 exposures. Once you've taken the number of shots you selected to use is when the camera will save the Raw or jpeg file.

nicksr1125 Loc: Mesa, AZ

Thanks for sharing the technique. Unfortunately, my Alpha 850 won't do multiple exposures in any fashion. It has to be done in PP.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Thank you an interesting technique I don't think i could do it in camera but thats what post processing is for :) However more important is the choice of settings for each exposure and this is something i would like to try.

John Gerlach Loc: Island Park, Idaho

I didn't think Nikon would let you select an image to be the first of a multiple exposure, and if I were a Nikon fan, I would demand it. They probably just didn't think of it. I know it works with every Canon camera I have tried that offers multiple exposures. However, Canon is late to offer this feature, so only the latest models like the 5D Mark III and IV, and some others have it- multiple exposure capability. Hopefully, all cameras will offer this feature going forward.