Ghost photos

Last night, Joe and I went out for dessert with our friends Bob and Mary. We filled our faces with cheesecake and coffee and then we headed to a local cemetery for a little photo shoot.

But look what we got! A bunch of creepy ghost photos!

Bob and Mary's ghost kissing...



Mary with a weird looking ghost behind her...



Joe appears to be kissing a ghost in this one...



Here's one of Mary standing beside a monument, look at those ghosts looking out from behind it!



And lastly, look at the strange apparition in this one...



How did we do it? Joe figured out how to take these photos using a long exposure and very small aperture on the camera. The trick is to use a small aperture and around a 10 second exposure. Once he hit the shutter release, he would count to 3 or 4 and then the ghost in the image would leave the frame, allowing for the background to be exposed in the shot.

For example, in the kissing photos, he would push the shutter release, count out loud to 4 and then the ghost would run out of the frame and the solid person would stay perfectly still for the rest of the shot.

Another trick is to do it either at dawn (ya right) or dusk when there's not too much natural light available. With the long exposure, it's very easy to over-expose the shot. It was almost dark when we took these photos.

There wasn't much post-processing involved. I think he just changed the images to black and white (or sepia in some cases) and cropped them.

You could certainly achieve the same effect in Photoshop, but it was much more fun (and easier) to do it with the camera.

I don't think you need a DSLR to do this. As long as you can adjust the length of the exposure and your aperture on a point and shoot, although it may take some fiddling, I'm sure you could do it.

What fun!