Couple Corey and Krystin exchanged vows in Bellingham, Washington, at the Bellingham Ferry Terminal. For their wedding portraits, they walked with photographer Joe Tobiason to the dock below their hotel where they found overcast skies and windy conditions, an ideal backdrop for Tobiason’s vision of a meaningful, mood-filled double exposure.

Using his Mamiya RZ67, he first exposed for groom Corey’s chest. “I knew that in the grey light of the bay, his dark jacket would be the only thing to survive a double exposure,” explains Tobiason, who then captured Krystin’s face, taking care that it was positioned correctly in the frame. “I wanted to show a connection between them, but in a different way,” he says of the photograph. “I was trying to show their simultaneous independence and dependence. It’s kind of cliché, but using his heart as the location of her face seemed like a natural place to bring them together.”

While Tobiason says the physical mechanism on the RZ67 makes it easy to take double exposures, there’s still a lot of planning and luck that goes into each frame. “I can’t even count how many don’t turn out right,” he says of the double exposures he has tried. Fortunately, the elements worked in his favor for this photograph. Tobiason also scanned and developed the film himself which, he says, “enabled me to go back and re-scan the image a few times to make sure that the story I want to be told really comes through.”

(Captured using a Mamiya RZ67 with a Mamiya 110mm f/2.8 and Kodak Tri-X 400 film.)

Photo © Joe Tobiason

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