Multi-exposure after the fact

Again, long time no post, been very lazy I suppose, watching old TV shows and playing bloody Clash of Clans. Anyway, I’m posting this one which is a bit technical about a photography post-processing technique that I had a go at with a set of pictures I took at Murodo station in Japan. I was actually trying to take a bunch of multi-exposure shots in one shot (Pentax feature), but accidentally forgot to set the multi-exposure setting and ended up taking half a dozen separate stills. So here I was with a bunch of stills and no motion in the clouds as I wanted.

I decided to see if it could be done easily and for free (using open source/free software), turns out that it could, and with pretty reasonable results at that. Hat tip to patdavid.net for the tutorial on how to do this but I did it on mac osx, pretty much exactly the same commands using hugin and imagemagick. I pretty much followed his instructions and got the result that I was looking for, it would’ve been better if I had taken more pictures and used an ND filter, but I was experimenting I guess. You should be able to make out a subtle difference in the sharpness of the clouds, the multi-exposure showing a tiny smidge of motion. It’s definitely a good thing to know, but I’d prefer to do it in camera to reduce the number of files I am working with.

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