Through My Lens: Layer Sandwich

There's a lot I've forgotten from my high school photography class (a lot more than I remember, I'd wager...), but one thing I do remember is the unit we did on negative sandwiches. Since digital was still rather expensive, we worked exclusively with film photography (yes, I know that sentence made me sound like I am reminiscing about the good ol' days when dirt was invented). The idea is to load two negatives into the enlarger and simultaneously create an exposure of both images.

The task is harder than it sounds, though--some photos work better than others: the contrast, how busy the background is, location of the subject in each photo, and a range of other factors determine whether you end up with a really cool image, or just a blob of indistinguishable nonsense. I seem to recall wasting rather a lot of expensive photo paper working to create a decent negative sandwich.

Much as I enjoy developing my own film, one of the beautiful things about digital photography is that I can create hundreds of terrible negative sandwiches without paying through the nose for my experiments. So, using layers in GIMP, I decided to throw together a few negative sandwiches--or perhaps layer sandwiches is more appropriate for digital? I've spared you the worst of them, but I think a few came out pretty well. Below are a few of the creations, as well as the original layered images. Some of these I think came out well. Others I think are examples of poor attempts.

As always, feedback is appreciated. I'd love to get your thoughts!