Strange and Unusual
Descriptions
"Ghost": With "Photoshop", this picture could be done easily. Just take a background photo, paste in a picture of a person, and change the "opacity" of the pasted image to 10-20 percent so that you could see through it, and you're done! Not the case here, though. This photo was done the old fashioned way: on film with a long exposure (about 10 seconds). The camera was on a tripod, and during the exposure, I quickly placed myself in front of the dark blinds, waved my arms for a couple of seconds, and then moved out of the picture. The result is a long exposure for the background, and a short one for me.
This explains the majority of so-called "ghost" pictures. They're simply a long exposure where someone (the "ghost") moved quickly through the shot.
"Lighting a Match": Another long exposure, in a darkened room. Lighting the match provided enough light to illuminate my hands, but not enough to light up the room. As my hand moved, it left a trail across the frame.
"UFO 1,2": Once again, with "Photoshop", a simple matter of cut and paste, and, once again, not how these pictures were done. I started with a long exposure of the building and the sky (10-20 seconds), and then rewound the film to be able to re-expose the same frame. Then I hung a small plastic disc (about an inch wide) with a dark thread against a dark background. In "UFO1", I lit it up with a candle, and in UFO2, I used a flash. Since the thread and background were darker than the image of the building and sky, they didn't show up. All that came through in the second exposure was the disc, which showed up because it was brighter than the background.
It took me several hours and a whole roll of film to get these two pictures, which can be done now digitally in a few seconds. How times have changed...
