As a freelance photographer there was one phrase which sometimes taunted me... "You're only as good as the last job you do." What it meant was that if I goofed with my last set of shots for a client... then that was possibly, or more like probably, the last time their voice would be at the end of the phone with an offer of more work. That's why as a freelancer it was smart to have as many varied outlets for your services as possible rather than all your eggs in the same basket.

So by playing the numbers game I frequently used a photo technique which was simple to do but difficult to keep simple... that of using multiple-exposures... but with a twist!

Multiple-images are what they say... more than one image recorded (usually) on the same frame of film. I can't think, off-hand, of any cameras which can't be used for this technique... and I have to admit that with modern auto-everything cameras it's far easier to do successfully than with the older metal, mechanical, meterless cameras I tended to use until very recently.

What you do is first decide on the number of exposures which would make an interesting final image... then calculate the exposure required for each individual image which becomes the same exposure you would have used with a single shot... make the adjustments... then fire away.

With my mechanical cameras I have to press the shutter once... press the camera rewind button in to release the wind-on clutch... cap the lens and wind-on... uncap the lens and take the second shot... and so on maybe nine, sixteen, twenty-five times! However, when I'm serious about multiple-exposures I use a motor-driven camera keeping my finger or thumb on the rewind button/switch whilst firing away on the motor-drive. On the most modern film camera I ever used, a Nikon F4 about 15 years ago, there was an automatic feature to program the number of shots required and the camera did the rest. I also had an MF-23 Multi Function Back for that F4 which, once programmed, would do many things at intervals, including bracketing multi-exposures at different times of the day... but that's not photography to my mind. No doubt some of today's cameras pause if a cloud obscures the sun so as not to ruin a "perfect" shot!