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"The article is complete nonsense! It matters not a jot in which order you combine multiple exposures." Thank you so much Rodeo Joe, that's exactly what I needed to know... all the best.... --Claudio

These statements and photos have nothing to do with me, I found them in an online tutorial professing to offer guidance to beginners. The unnamed author proposes that the order in which you take your set of multiple exposures will produce differing results, but I suggest that the two photos presented do not support any such notion--they look different because the shot of the flowers was taken from a different position in the second photo. But I would still like some technical explanation for why the order does or does not matter. Also, I think both of those sample photos along with the other ones in the original article are rather poor, and probably incorrectly exposed. I am including one of my own below to show that you can have multiple exposures without huge light areas in them. I see no reason to change my exposure compensation method, it works just fine.....

Thank you Mr. Marcus for the explanation of pre-exposure and hypersensitization. I should explain my usual method for setting the exposures is the common rule of thumb whereby you multiply the ISO of your film by the number of exposures you are going to do and set the ISO to that on the camera. So if you have 100-speed film and you want to do four exposures on one frame you would set the ISO to 400. I'm not at all sure that the ISO will be higher on the subsequent exposures, from all my experience they are equal. On looking at the sample photos provided by the authors of the cited tutorial, it occurs to me that the two photos used are not at all the same shots: in the first photo the flower branches are covering less of the model's profile than in the second one, which is taken from a different position. If the shots were exactly the same except taken in a different order, we should still be able to see, however faintly, the fuller field of flowers in the first photo, and there is nothing there.

I have been merrily doing in-camera multiple exposures on colour slide film for years now, without ever considering the order in which the exposures should be taken, simply assuming unconsciously that it should make no difference. Recently I came across a tutorial that claims the order in which you make the exposures will produce different results: [from https://thefindlab.com/2017/08/02/shooting-double-exposures-on-film/] Remember how highlight and shadow detail will be influenced by shooting two frames on top of each other. -The shadows of your first frame will be filled in by your second frame -The highlights of your first frame will be mostly lost in the second frame Here are two photos of the same scenes just shot in different order: in the first image, we shot our model first and the blossoms second. In the second image, we shot the blossoms first and the model second. You can see how the detail in both scenes is influenced by shooting one before the other: I'm still skeptical, and I wonder if any of the experts here would address this question. If it's true that the order makes a difference then this should be an important consideration when doing multiple exposures, yet I have found no mention of it in any other guide or discussion of the technique, and I have looked through many.....

I just can't tell you how much I appreciate this information, I'm very very happy and I will be putting it into practice first thing tomorrow. Thank you so much!

This is exactly what I need, thanks! How do you arrive at these numbers, so I can generalize the calculation to different situations, such as different ISOs or more or fewer exposures. Thanks again....

It's going to be something like one shot at 200 and two at 800 or 1600, what I need is the formula....

I have a question about doing multiple exposures in a film camera. I would like to be able to give more prominence to one exposure over the others. I have found a way to do it using the tripod but it would be useful to know how to do the calculations and not have to use the tripod. For example, using 100 speed film, to do five exposures I set the ISO to 500, and to give one image more weight I can take two or three identical exposures with the camera on the tripod and the others will be paler. My question is how to calculate the ISO setting to do the same thing, one ISO for the image that should have more weight, another for the rest.