Fine Art Photography Blog

Normally, shooting “ghosts” is a pretty easy thing to do;  a double-exposure does the trick pretty nicely.

Of course, that’s a Film Age trick, and needs to be handled differently with digital.  Photoshop can come to the rescue, as always.  A long-exposure is a more natural way to accomplish the same thing, and demands low light … ghostly ambiance.  Shoot a scene in bulb mode, and put the lens cap on when your image is almost properly exposed.  Position your subject, then take the cap off and finish the exposure.  Most of the background will have already sunk into the photo;  only a hint of your subject will show up, like an apparition.  A similar trick can be done with a flash.

Sometimes, though, the camera plays its own tricks.  Try as I might, I can’t figure this one out:  Gandolph the Gray, from Lord of the Rings, or at least his ghost, seems to have shown up in a waterfall shot this spring, near Talapus Lake.

Have a look at the original;  he’s highlighted below:

Here’s a close-up:

It looks perfect.  You can make out eyes and a beard … even the hands are right - they look like mittens, with a fre thumb.  Never mind the arm and torso!  This is magnified and sharpened, but otherwise untouched;  I swear this isn’t a Photoshop trick.

We’re all hard-wired to recognize faces, with a few devastating exceptions ( face blindness ).  Maybe this is a blob of dust behind the lens, and a clever filling in of the blanks?  What looks like a staff in his left hand, turns out to be a pine branch.  An illusion is the best explanation I have, anyway.