On November 7, 2015 I took my plastic Holga Wide Pinhole Camera (WPC) to downtown Phoenix to take pictures of the city at night. I like night photography. The problem was the pinhole. I discovered that pinhole exposures at night could easily take hours because of the reciprocity failure of film. Initially I had thought it would take a few minutes for each photo, but when I calculated the times, after multiplying with aforementioned villainous factor I realized that each exposure could take at least 30 minutes and up to 90 minutes. So I set the camera up on a tripod, started a stopwatch, and stared at the WPC. After five minutes, I was bored.
There was nothing to do, after all. You can’t just stand in one place staring at your camera for two hours. You can’t leave either because someone is sure to trip over the tripod, knock it down, call the police or worse, just take it away. Therefore, in order to entertain myself (and the passers-by) I pulled out my Zorki-4k, loaded with a roll of Fuji Eterna 500T and started photographing people and things around me. I finished the roll. But there was still about 45 minutes left on the pinhole! So I rewinded the film, loaded it back and shot it over again. I had wanted to do a double exposure project for a long time and this was as good a time as any. I think I changed the orientation to portrait for the second set of exposures, but may be not for all. I didn’t develop the film until recently (recent by my time scale is about 2 months ago) and finally got it scanned. Richard Photo Lab scanned it for me (I bet they were a bit confused about the contents).
These are the photos of the ghosts of Phoenix.
Very friendly ghosts, of course.
As you probably know or feel that you knew but couldn’t remember, ghosts exist at the intersection of dimensions, whatever that might mean.
You may wonder what makes these people so ethereal.
Like dream superimposed on another dream encapsulated in a nightmare.
Filmstock? That’s a strange coincidence? But then coincidences are strange.
Did you notice that no body was driving that last car? This one is just an apparition.
Life is generally ONE WAY. But some manage to come back…
Last Hurrah!
Thank you for visiting.
dreamy collection and interesting lesson how to be ready for a few hours for a few frames of pinhole.
but where the pinhole result Dev !
Haha, people have asked me that a few times now. May be I will include the pinhole images in a revision. Thanks for visiting Victor.
If course ! Hust at bottom – i would like to see exactly your long way to this or few pinhole images !!!
So am I getting this right: You like these double exposures _better_ than the wide pinhole images?
They certainly are fun to scrutinize. Some of them have a rainy look — or like the aftermath of a rain, when streets would be slick. I assume that’s just the reflective appearance from the double exposures.
And I’m pretty sure none of these are images I could get from my digital camera!
Oh I liked the pinhole photos too, just that they took very very very long to expose, upwards of 30 min for a single photo. It’s better during the day with more light. It still takes much longer than a regular “lensed” camera–about 1000x, for example if the lens takes 1/1000 seconds, the pinhole might need 1s or 2s. However, you don’t perceive that factor as much. But at night, a lens might require 1s, so the pinhole would need 1000s, which is about 17min. Reciprocity failure factor is a multiplier. It simply means once the exposure time is 1s or longer you have to compensate by multiplying by N. So not only will it be 1000s, it might be 1000 times N. It varies from film to film, but say N is 2. Therefore a 1s exposure through a lens would become a 1000 *times an extra factor* N(=2). So suddenly you have a 34 min exposure!! That’s some serious commitment for a single photo.
Yes, the double-exposure makes them look as though there is water or people are transparent and so on. They can be done digitally too, but after the fact, in Photoshop (or in your case GIMP, hehe). You have to layer to different photos and combine them using some formula. But as such it is not spontaneous.