Experimental portraits: multiple exposures

This shoot was inspired by Jake Wangner, who I feel is really pushing the boundaries of what a portrait can be. He uses long exposures, motion blur, and double exposures on film to create a psychologically and emotionally charged portrait. Most of his work is on his instagram page @jakewangner if you want to check it out.

Before I started, I wanted to do some research on how I could accomplish something similar to his style. This great article on F-Stoppers gave me some ideas:

https://fstoppers.com/commercial/weird-lighting-tricks-101-78250

Since this was all about freezing movements, I thought Olivia Zimmerman would be a perfect collaborator on this project given her background in dance.

I slightly modified the techniques in the article. My setup was two strobes: one set up to my left, and one to my right. I went with a 5 second shutter with the camera set up on a tripod. The shutter delay was set to 2 seconds so I would have some time to get into position.

Once the shutter opened, I jumped over to my first strobe and manually fired it. Then I told Olivia to move to the second position and I manually fired the second strobe once she was set and before the shutter closed.

Later on in the shoot I experimented with firing the strobes as fast as possible to get even more exposures while Olivia was in constant motion. We got as many as 4 exposures in that 5 second window. Olivia did an amazing job. This shoot required a lot of choreography from her and and a lot of precision. This is a style I'm looking forward to expanding on and trying out more. Check out the slideshow to see some samples of the work.