I was asked to contribute images to a photography exhibition in Vienna. This surprised me, because I do not generally think of my work as exhibition material, and I said as much to the person who asked. He insisted. So I made a series of multi-exposure self-portraits on black and white paper reversal specifically for the show, lit with a Tolifo PL100 RGB Palm Light, and this is the story of how they came out.
There are two things going on in this piece. One is a technique I had wanted to try for years (multiple exposures on paper reversal) which produced a genuinely unexpected and rather beautiful result. The other is some honest reflection on what it means to be asked to exhibit when your default position is that your work is not worth exhibiting. Both feel worth writing about.
There is also a light review tucked in, because the Tolifo PL100 is the light that has been quietly lighting the backgrounds of my videos for months, and it earned a proper mention.
The exhibition, and my discomfort with it
When the message arrived asking me to submit work, my first instinct was to decline. My honest self-assessment is that I am a competent photographer who makes interesting things occasionally, not an artist whose work belongs on a gallery wall. I told the person this. He said he disagreed and asked me to send images anyway.
There is a thing worth naming here, because I have been turning it over since. It is very easy to pre-emptively run your own work down so that nobody else gets the chance to. If you tell everyone your photography is rubbish before they look at it, then any judgment they pass has been defanged in advance. You cannot be disappointed by a verdict you have already delivered on yourself. It is a kind of insurance against rejection, and it is also a kind of self-sabotage, because it guarantees you never put your actual best work forward to be judged on its merits.
I am not going to pretend I have resolved this. I notice the pattern in myself and I am suspicious of it. The exhibition was useful partly because it forced me, just once, to make something deliberately, with the intention of it being seen, rather than my usual mode of making things to see what happens and then shrugging at the results.
Helpfully, the exhibition is in a country I cannot easily get to, and I will be one of fifty or sixty photographers each contributing a strip of images. So the stakes are low. Nobody is going to be standing in front of a wall-sized print of my face. I can submit, be part of something, and not have to walk around a gallery feeling exposed.
The project I chose to make
Rather than dig through my back catalogue for a cohesive set (which I do not really have), I decided to use the exhibition as an excuse to do a project I had been thinking about for a long time: multiple-exposure self-portraits.
The thinking behind it is genuinely about introspection. The YouTube channel began, among other things, as a way of seeing myself, of working out how others might see me, of looking at my own face and presence and trying to understand it. That is part of why I keep returning to self-portraits. They are uncomfortable and revealing in a way that photographing other people is not.
The multiple-exposure idea takes that further. The plan: shoot myself many times on a single sheet, trying each time to return to exactly the same position, knowing I will fail. The failure is the point. Each exposure is a slightly different version of the same face, and the final image is a compilation of all those attempts, all those slightly-different selves layered into one. As a metaphor for self-perception (the impossibility of seeing yourself the same way twice) it felt right.
![PLACEHOLDER: the studio setup in the garage, with the backdrop down, the Tolifo light overhead, and the Air Force 4x5 in position]
The setup
Camera: Stenopeika Air Force 4x5.
Paper: Foma Speed N311, which had given good results in previous testing, developed in Ansco 120 to completion at every stage as usual for my paper reversal process.
Light: the Tolifo PL100 RGB Palm Light, mounted on a stand overhead, shooting down from a height onto the backdrop and the subject (me). Initially the light was quite aggressive and hard, so I softened it with a sheet of paper as a quick diffuser, which gave a noticeably more even spread.
Metering: Sekonic L858-D, spot-metering my own face, the same method I use throughout the paper reversal portrait work. The face metered at around 12 seconds for a single exposure at f5.6 on the N311. For a single shot, 12 seconds is awkwardly long. For multiple exposures it was perfect, because I could break it into twelve exposures of roughly one second each.
Focusing: posing stand at the back of the head, focus set on where the eyes would be, the usual approach.
The multiple-exposure method
The core idea is to expose the same sheet of paper many times without developing in between, building up a single composite image. For this project:
- Load a sheet, set up the focus and frame, meter the scene
- Sit in position, head against the posing stand
- Fire the shutter for roughly one second
- Return to a neutral position
- Get back into the same pose, as close as possible to identical
- Fire again
- Repeat for twelve exposures total, totalling the metered 12 seconds
- Develop the sheet to completion
The crucial variable is the imperfection of my own repositioning. No matter how hard I try to return to exactly the same pose, I cannot. Each of the twelve exposures lands my face in a slightly different place. The composite is the sum of those small failures.
What came out, and why it surprised me
Here is the genuinely interesting bit, and the reason I will be coming back to this technique.
When you do multiple exposures on film, you typically get ghosting: clear, distinct overlaid images, each one recognisable, stacked on top of each other with that characteristic see-through quality. I expected the same here.
That is not what happened.
Because the latitude of paper reversal is so narrow (the range of exposure the paper can hold is much smaller than film), the twelve individual exposures did not stack as twelve distinct ghost images. Instead they built up into a soft, amorphous accumulation of exposure concentrated where my face spent most of its time. Rather than twelve sharp ghosts, I got a single blurred buildup, a kind of dense central mass of face fading out at the edges where my position varied most.
Each individual one-twelfth exposure was too faint to register on its own, so the outliers (the positions I only briefly occupied) did not show up as clear separate images the way they would on film. What I got was much more painterly, much more blurred, much more like a single unstable impression of a face than a stack of distinct faces.
I liked it more than I expected to. It was closer to the introspection idea than sharp ghosting would have been: not “here are twelve clear versions of me” but “here is the blurred composite of all my attempts to be the same person, none of which quite worked.”
![PLACEHOLDER: the favourite multi-exposure self-portrait from the session, showing the soft amorphous buildup effect]
The frames
I worked through nine sheets, refining as I went.
Test shot. A single exposure to check the lighting and focus. Slightly overexposed, some motion blur, hard to tell if it was sharp. Adjusted the light further back for a more even spread.
First multiple exposure. Twelve one-second exposures. Came out much as I hoped. A distracting reflection off my hoodie needed dealing with, and the framing was slightly high.
Reframed versions. Lowered myself in the frame, raised the camera, got the composition where I wanted it.
Closer framing. Moved in for a full-face composition, refocused closer. This produced one of my favourites.
Different facial expressions. Tried varying the expression across the set. Discovered that the technique does not suit a big toothy grin. Interestingly, when I pulled an aggressive face, I was able to hit almost exactly the same position every time, which meant the fizzing buildup effect almost disappeared. Apparently I make that particular face so habitually that my muscle memory nails it. The aggressive-face frame became my favourite of the whole shoot.
The honest verdict on the submission
The frames went off to Vienna. I am happy with them as images. I achieved what I set out to achieve technically.
Am I happy with them as an exhibition submission? Not entirely. I feel like a single session is not really enough for a coherent body of work. By the end of the session I felt like I was just starting to understand the technique and where it could go. A longer-term study would have produced something I would stand behind more confidently. As a one-off submission, it feels a little thin.
But I have never submitted to an exhibition before and I genuinely do not know what the bar is. Maybe it is fine. Maybe everyone feels this way about their own submissions. Maybe the discomfort is just the self-sabotage instinct reasserting itself now that the work is out of my hands and about to be judged.
I am going to leave that unresolved, because it is unresolved.
The technique has legs
Setting aside the exhibition, the multiple-exposure paper reversal technique is something I will absolutely return to. The amorphous-buildup effect is distinctive and I have not seen it done much. It suits the introspection theme in a way I find genuinely satisfying. With more time, a longer study, and some refinement of the approach, I think there is a real project in it.
One reflection from afterwards: the narrow latitude that produced the soft blur might not always be what I want. Sometimes the buzzing, sharp, distinct-ghost effect of film multiple exposures might serve the idea better. So a future version of this project might use film sheets rather than paper, for more latitude and more defined overlaps. Or it might use both, for different images within the same series. Worth experimenting.
The premise holds either way: multiple exposures of a single face, each an attempt to be identical, all of them failing, the final image a composite of the failures. As a way of looking at yourself, it works.
The Tolifo PL100 RGB Palm Light
The light deserves its own note because it has been a workhorse for months.
The Tolifo PL100 is a compact 100-watt RGB LED light. It does full-colour output (every colour under the sun, useful for lighting backgrounds, which is mostly what I have used it for) and a range of white temperatures. It comes with a small clip-on reflector (a miniature Bowens-style mount) and a diffuser dome. It has a built-in handle, which I did not use for this shoot since I mounted it on a stand, and it is rechargeable.
What I like about it:
- Compact and powerful. Small enough to be unobtrusive, powerful enough to have a real effect on everything I have used it for.
- Holds its charge well. Long sessions without needing a recharge, and it charges back up reasonably quickly.
- Flexible. The colour range and white range cover most lighting situations. The background lighting in most of my recent videos (including the blue you might have seen) is this light.
It has been lighting the backgrounds of my videos for a while and doing it well. For a compact rechargeable RGB light it is a solid recommendation. It is the light I reach for when I need to add colour to a background or provide a compact fill.
(For higher-power work, like paper reversal portraits that need serious output, I have since moved to a more powerful light, which I cover in the Sirui C150X Lite review. But for background lighting and general fill, the Tolifo remains in regular use.)
What is next
This shoot was also, quietly, a step toward the bigger paper reversal project: the ULF portrait box camera, which I am close to finishing. That build is more involved than just assembling a box (there is a tripod mount, carry handles, a lens cone to get the enormous lens the right distance from the paper plane, and a great deal of painting). It is coming soon.
For now, I have submitted to an exhibition for the first time in my life, discovered a technique I am genuinely excited about, and confirmed that the Tolifo light is a keeper. Not a bad day’s work, self-sabotage instinct notwithstanding.