ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

Adam Waring shows you how to capture the full majesty of a hard-to-frame scene by combining multiple exposures in-camera

Sometimes the scene you see with the naked eye just doesn’t translate as well when captured on camera.

While our brains do a good job of editing out the superfluous when we see things with our own eyes if presented with something spectacular, the two-dimensional rendition of a shot often just doesn’t do it justice.

Take the enormous full moon we saw looming above the silhouetted peak of Mount Kenya when on a safari trip; both the towering mountain and enlarged lunar body were majestic, with our eyes flitting from one to the other (conveniently ignoring the empty space between them). But trying to capture the scene on the camera to fit both in, even at the full extent of our 70-200mm zoom, left both looking small. Switching to a 500mm lens made the individual subjects much more dominant, but impossible to capture in a single frame.

The solution? Take a double exposure, shooting the first frame of the mountain peak and then reframing the shot to bring the moon into the frame above it. Double exposures are nothing new – they’ve been around since the days of film, when two shots were taken without winding the film on. It was tricky back then, but it’s easier these digital days, with many cameras and even smartphones enabling you to combine images in-camera, balancing the exposures in the process.