Double Exposures at Riverside

As I have already posted, yesterday, we had a little saunter in Riverside Park on Sunday after having more or less being barricaded out of the park by snow since early December.

On this day, I ported my real camera and my longest lens because it is a stretch to photograph across the river, and that is where many of my photo attempts took me.

I have been here in this park with my camera many many times previously and on many many nice days but our world is still a dull brown and will remain so for awhile yet. So, with the scene looking extremely dowdy, I went  back to attempting double exposures. I figure that if the double doesn't work, I still will have the original single photo on my camera.

Across the river lies an unused boathouse. I have very nice old photos of it in winter when the door still had better colour. In fact, I made prints of them way back when, and they were quite good, even if I do say so myself.

On Sunday, I took an initial photo that included the boathouse, and for my second, overlay photo I turned the camera to a nearby stand of birches. I have two variations, below. The following two photos are both double exposures as the camera did them. and I did not merge in Photoshop this time around. Of course, there was still cropping and/or adjusting in post, but the overlay itself was done in-camera.

I keep my eyes out for benches for Flickr use as these is a bench meme there on Mondays, and I did two double exposures using benches. In the second, I made the stylistic choice to highlight the bench with a pretty bright green, for the green on the bench had gotten a bit lost in the overlay. It’s a bold green that is not meant to be the actual colour of the bench  

This bench has its feet in the water at this flood stage.

Then I went to town on another double by redoubling an original double exposure from the camera with more layers that I subsequently added manually in post. After that I applied other filters. I never have a vision or goal in mind but just try this and try that to see where the picture goes. It's pretty abstract, but the trees still hold their shapes pretty well. It’s weird, but I like it.

Who knows where I am going with these double exposures. Maybe next time, I will revert back to blending manually in Photoshop rather than accepting the camera's rendition. Time will tell, but in the meantime, it is adding some variety to my photography, especially allowing me to explore familiar places differently because I don't often get to new places these days.