Multiple exposure instructions requested for 7D Mark II

I just received my Canon 7D Mark II.
i shoot mostly sports, and one thing that the 7D Mark II will do is multiple exposures.
This afternoon I attempted some test shots, hand held in my yard, with poor results.
My goal is to be able to shoot a baseball pitcher or softball pitcher, and in-camera, get an image worth keeping.
I have tinkered with the settings on the Mark II regarding multiple exposure, but again, my tests were very poor today.

Can anyone that has used their 7D Mark II at an actual sporting event and produced high quality multiple exposures please tell me what their settings were, that they were successful with.

I will be using a Gitzo monopod and I understand that the viewfinder must not pan or tilt while shooting.

My current settings are:
Multiple Exposure
On:ContShtng
Multi-expos ctrl: Additive
No. of exposures: 4
Save source imgs: All images
Continue Mult-exp Continuously

Assuming it is a baseball game and daylight, ISO 400, and lets say a normal exposure in AV Mode is 2000 sec @ f8, what would you do?
Again, I know experimenting is going to be the best teacher but I am shooting a game this Friday and hope to have more to go on before then.

An example of what I want to achieve is a baseball pitcher on the mound, with four images of him throwing, captured in sequence in one frame.

Thanking you in advance,
Dan of Troy

I must admit I have never used the multiple exposure facility in my 7D2 but I would have thought you were better off taking a sequence of seperate shots and merging them afterwards rather than relying on the camera to do it, that way you will have more control over the final result.

Ramon-uk wrote in post #18410727
I must admit I have never used the multiple exposure facility in my 7D2 but I would have thought you were better off taking a sequence of seperate shots and merging them afterwards rather than relying on the camera to do it, that way you will have more control over the final result.

Yeah, doing it in camera is very hit and miss and you will have to put up with how the camera chooses to blend them. Just take your shots individually then stack and blend them in photoshop manually, you have much, much more control over the final image.

The problem with bright backgrounds is that they shine through behind the foreground.
Say that you want to take two pictures of a person, one with his arm up, the other with it down.
When you take the picture with the arm up, everything is normal. Then he lowers the arm and you take the next picture. Assuming he's able to stand perfectly still, and you have the camera on a tripod, the background and the person will register perfectly with the first shot. But where the arm was up, the background is now visible, so it will wash out the arm. In the lower position of the arm, the background was registered in the first shot, and now the arm, so it will be equally washed out.
Apart from this, if you shoot this in additive mode, everything will be overexposed by one stop, as you add two pictures together. You solve that by setting exposure compensation one stop dark before starting.

Now if the background was black/dark, the two positions of the arm would both be void of any interference from the background, and you'll get two nice arms with no shine-through of the background.

You get the same effect if you simply blend two images in post processing. It takes masking and layers to separate them from each other, to get good arms in both positions and a nice background.

Here's an example image. You can see the blue haze over the image. from the sky when the moon was shot separately. But this is done in-camera, with a 1DX.

Photo

A multiple exposure blend mode in camera can't isolate your subject, and will blend the total exposure of your whole frame. As Anders points out, using a blend mode for the entire frame is easier with a black background since it's not factored in an additive blend. The best way to have an action sequence photo is to do it in post. Using layers and masks, just get your subject. Then if you want to show some semi-transparency between the layers/ use blend modes then.

/tutorial-how-to-create-action-sequence-shots-using-composite-photography

Given the capabilities in post processing, I fail to understand the motivations for multiexposure in the 7DII

Canon has a nice setup cheat sheet at https://support.usa.ca​non.com …page=content&id​=ART116410. If you attempt to follow through the steps, I suggest you print it out since it is quite extensive.

Gentlemen,

Thank you very much for your advice and input. Needless to say, you know what happens when one assumes, and I assumed all those great multi-exposure sports shots I was seeing were done in-camera, never knowing they were Photoshop. That's the direction I am heading now. As always, your knowledge and expertise is appreciated.

Dan of Troy

It will be hard to get a multiple exposure shot (you can try the additive function) of a baseball pitcher for example, unless you strobe it while doing the exposure. I had to photoshop the following one. I did get the 2nd shot in camera though using the multiple exposure mode.

A couple of multiple exposures on the 7D2, as my daughter was having to do this with film for her class. We tested using the 7D2 first. Just a minor edit on the first one, one of the pool balls exposed just outside the vase, so I had to clone a bit of it out.