Double Exposure

For this assignment, we had to simulate what it would look like if we had taken a picture over a picture when using a film camera in a process called double exposure. We were to use Photoshop to recreate such an effect, as all of our work is digital. For this composition, I used a picture I had taken of dark rain clouds I had taken a while ago with a picture I had taken of my staircase with the shutter speed very low to let in a lot of light. The concept that connects these two images is spookiness- the clouds are dark and gloomy, and the staircase looks ghostly with the top of the stairs fading to white. I attempted to make this photo compositionally sound, with the stairs making the positive space and the light parts of the clouds filling the negative space. I used the Rectangular Marquee Tool in Photoshop to copy the whole image of the stairs and paste it into a new layer above the cloud picture. I then adjusted the opacity of the new layer to 21% because if I had it any higher, it would have been brighter and yellower, whereas if I had it any lower, it would be darker but the stairs would be less visible. The message my composite image conveys is one of the afterlife or a scary childhood fear. I could improve my composition if I made the percent of opacity of the stairs lower, because they are still visible but it would make the piece all the more psychological if it were darkened.