iphone double exposures using blender & vsco

lunch with Nic in the big blue room, Sunday

I’ve been a big fan of vsco since a lunch date with Penny & Xanthe a while back when they were raving about it. Thanks to them, I’ve now got (and regularly use) the vsco Film emulators for Lightroom. Pretty much any photograph I have posted here recently that wasn’t made with a film camera, has had one of their filters applied. I used the original VSCO Cam™ for iPhone and upgraded as soon as the new one was announced.

I was wandering back through the vsco journal archives over the weekend and watched Sara K Byrne’s tutorial on creating double exposures (even if you’re not interested in HOW to do these yourself go check that link, her images are amazing).

Since I don’t have any of the digital SLR’s that are capable of in-camera doubles, I thought I’d try to make some basic double exposures using my iPhone, the Blender (Photo Blend FX) app and the new VSCO Cam™ – Visual Supply Company filters.

My first attempts are certainly not perfect – the Blender (Photo Blend FX) app is fairly rudimentary with a very basic UI that doesn’t allow me to choose where the second image is overlaid. I had to fiddle with these A LOT to get them how I wanted.

And by A LOT I mean, making a few images of the person in the portrait (different angles, closer-in, further-away etc. – always with an overexposed sky behind them), then having a handful of different ‘nature’ images to try. The portrait needs to be the first image, with the nature image as the second one and, since it’s not possible to move the images around, it pays to have a few to play around with if your first one doesn’t work.

Once I had a double I finally liked, I opened it in the vsco cam app and chose a filter, then added some basic mods for exposure etc. to get the final results.

Have you ever tried any double exposures with your phone? I’d love to hear about your results.

self-portrait, yesterday

I could have opened these in photoshop on my computer and messed around with them a bit more, but I’ve deliberately left them as they were made with my phone.