I honestly don’t think that double exposure is necessary at all. Millions of pictures with smoke will also have quite detailed faces if you look for them enough.
Beyond “interesting”-Do you have anything to say about the possibility that the images you posted may have noting to do with the supernatural, given the evidence provided so far?
No, double exposure is not necessary, but the person in the upper corner (and his “reflection” towards the lower left) in the second picture linked to in the OP is absolutely an actual person’s face. It is not pattern finding in smoke or lights or anything like that. It is absolutely a face, 100% bet-the-house-on-it. The only question is what photographic settings were responsible for it. It could have been (and in my estimation is), a single exposure as demonstrated by me in my dog photo, but it can also have been made with a double exposure.
Ouch. That was painful.
That reminds me of a postcard that I found in my grandmother’s things. It purported to be a picture that a little old lady had taken, that when developed showed Jesus on the wing of the airplane she was riding in.
You could tell it was an obvious double exposure. First, it wasthatpicture of Jesus. Second, the image of Jesus was square. You could even see a bit of ghost frame. And people were buying them and mailing them to each other.
The back of the postcard included the story and information on how to order more. I remember getting one from her, tucked into a letter. I have no idea how many people she sent them to. But that’s how it happened pre-internet.
You may as well be looking for UFO photos. It’s all the work of either delusional people or flimflam artists.
That would certainly seem very unlikely. This particular gal claims to be a ghost buster, but different from what you see on the television with infrared cameras and all that, she claims to be able to see ghosts and that her job is to communicate with them and convince them to go into the other side.
It is really hilarious, in my opinion, the notion of someone making a living by going into strangers’ homes and pretending to talk to air for about an hour. However, certainly stranger things have happened than that in this world.
:D:D:D:D
I think we should paws for a moment as this discussion is being dogged by controversy.
And I don’t think that there’s a ghost of a chance of it being real.
How come the parts lit by the flash (grill, chair, etc) aren’t blurred by moving the camera? I know the flash would only illuminate for a brief time, but then wouldn’t there be at least a dark tinge on/over it? Or IS there, because the flash illuminated it even more brightly than the final image shows?
Note that there are zero details on the page. No date or location for the accident, no names for the victims or police, nothing to be verified or debunked. Almost like someone made it up whole cloth!
Because all those details are lit by the flash, which is faster than the shutter. Anything from another light source, like a reflected porch light or the moon, would blur due to camera movement, because the shutter is open longer to catch the flash, which may not synchronize perfectly with a faster shutter.
The flash is, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. I think that it lasts something like 1/10,000 of a second.
You are right that the shutter on a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera must open for a minimum period of time to catch the flash, but some people might be interested in why that’s the case. On an SLR camera, there are two shutters. The first shutter “opens” by sliding from one side and to the other, beginning the process of exposing the film or CCD. Then, a second shutter slides from the same side and “closes” at the same speed to cover the film or CCD and end the exposure. The time between the the first shutter starting to open and the second shutter starting to cover the film is the exposure time. It’s often called the shutter speed, but that’s a bit of a misnomer because the shutters don’t actually move any faster at higher “speeds.”
The two shutters allow you to give any SLR camera arbitrarily short exposure times since the only factor that affects the shutter time is the time between releasing the first shutter and releasing the second shutter. If a camera will shoot at 1/2000 of a second, that just means giving the first shutter a 1/2000 of a second head start on the second shutter.
The trick is that at the camera’s shortest exposure times, the first shutter will only have moved partway across the film or CCD before the second shutter starts to close. So at these short exposure times, there is no time when the entire frame is exposed to light. If the flash goes off at one of these exposure times, at least part of the frame will be completely blocked from the light of the flash and will be darker (perhaps completely black if there is little or no ambient light). The shortest exposure time that the SLR can take a flash picture without the blocking effect is called the “flash sync speed.” Cameras whose shutters actually move the fastest have the shortest flash sync speeds since the first shutter can make it all the way across the frame in a short period of time before the second shutter has to be released to chase it.
You can use the flash with a longer exposure time, but you might have an effect where parts brightly lit by the flash are clear and sharp, but other stuff lit by ambient light is dimmer and subject to the camera movement causing blurring and other weird effects. Pulykamell’s photos illustrate these effects very well. People who are so inclined see ghosts. People who understand see easily explained photographic effects.
There are other effects caused by the two shutters in an SLR. One is that if a fast moving subject is going from side-to-side in the same direction as the shutters, the subject will appear to be stretched out on the final picture. On the other hand, if the subject is moving opposite the direction of the shutter, it will appear to be compressed.
Chilling.
Tired and Cranky, thank you for the explanation of the shutters. I never knew that about the two shutters, and I wondered how the old-fashioned SLR cameras could have a mechanical shutter that opens for a mere 1/1000 of a second.
I’d like to add that it is common for automatic cameras to have much longer exposure times even when a flash is used. For example, the minimum flash exposure time may be 1/60 of a second, but in low light, many automatic cameras will choose an exposure time of 1/2 second or more. This allows for some nice effects, such as taking outdoor pictures of people just after sunset when the sky still has some light to it. With a really short exposure, the sky would be black, but leaving the shutter open a little longer shows the sky with its colors and the people lit by the flash. Of course, if the photographer is unaware of this, he could move the camera while the shutter is open and get artifacts. In the pictures that the OP posted, it looks to be one of those really long exposure times, with plenty of time to move the camera around when the flash isn’t lit. I suspect the photographer was inexperienced, at least with the specific camera used. If we had the original digital photo file, you can look at the EXIF information to see all this info like exposure time and whether a flash is used.
But I don’t really doubt that they’re authentic photos, because taking bad pictures is just something that happens all the time in real life. And it’s also common for people without much sense to misinterpret the results. What does bother me some is that this Echo person is using some family’s tragedy to promote herself and her misinformation.
My reply was to someone commenting on the second web site, the one going into an explanation of how the photo was clearly supernatural in origin, and using as evidence a story they clearly made up.
That these photos are authentic, that they show a picture of something and weren’t later manipulated is an undisputed assertion in this thread. There’s no reason to think the photo isn’t legitimate. But what is in the picture? Was it really a fatal accident? Of whom, when, where? Who actually took the photo? There’s no information for any of that, which makes the attempt to use the photos as “evidence” of supernatural phenomena to be silly.
That second site clearly just made up a story to fit their point of view and deliberately kept it vague enough that you can’t refute it.
What is Purgatory?
Ditto…though I usually tried to write or draw something. (The second one, I’d be willing to wager was a double-exposure including the face of the person waving the light around…which caught his head in either mid-turn, or moving forward.
The question’s been pretty much answered by the previous posters, but I’ll explain it as well. Actually, the easiest thing to do would be to put up some more sample photos showing what the camera “sees” for each exposure, but I can’t do that right now (because it’s, well, bright outside.) Nevermind–actually, looking through the files I shot, I can give you an example with what I shot.
So, I described the outside as being “pitch black.” Now, living in the city, that’s not exactly true, but the amount of light falling on the grill and deck, etc., is pretty negligible. The EXIF info for the ghost dog photo is ISO200, f/14, 2 seconds of exposure.
Here is a picture of just the grill, almost exactly at those setting. (The difference is actually 1/3 stop, which is pretty much negligible and doesn’t make any difference for illustrative purposes. Settings here are ISO200, f/11, 1 second):
Picture 1
See how despite the long exposure, it’s still pretty much completely black? There is not enough light hitting the sensor at those settings to register much of an exposure. There is a little bit of information there, though. If I go into my editing program and artificially increase the exposure by 5 stops (this would be the equivalent of having about a 30 second exposure at those settings), you get this:
You see that even increasing the exposure time 30 times (really 2^5, or 32 times), the foreground is still practically invisible–just the background lights in the sky are showing up. For all intents and purposes, there is very little light hitting the chair and grill and you’d have to have a significantly longer exposure for it to show up as anything but black.
OK, so do you understand that part so far?
Now, the dog is being lit by a flashlight, and there is no (or hardly any) light spill onto the grill or grate. The dog is about three feet left of the grill and spotlit by a flashlight directly on him. I linked to the following picture before:
That is an exposure equivalent to ISO200, f11, 2 seconds (it’s actually at f8, 1 second, which is exactly the same amount of light hitting the sensor). The flashlight is providing enough light on the subject that the exposure I am using is enough to illuminate the dog in the frame and get recorded by the sensor.
Let’s recap at this point: for the same, or nearly same, exposure the grill and background turn out completely black, but the spot lit dog shows up fine (maybe slightly dark and a little “ghosted” and blurry because of the long hand-held exposure.)
Now let’s add the flash to just the grill:
That’s at the same exposure as the previous photo. The flash power is enough to illuminate the grill and anything in the foreground, and as the distance from the camera increases, the illumination/power of the flash and what it is able to illuminated decreases via something called the “inverse square law.” All you need to really know is that the way that light falls off in relation to distance from the light source is rapid enough that by the time you get to the background, it’s almost completely black. If I were shooting this against a wall, the wall would be completely illuminated by the flash, and the image wouldn’t be possible–I need a black or near-enough-to-black background somewhere in the photo in which the ghosted image of the dog can appear.
The flash itself is fairly instantaneous, lasting something like 1/2000 second, depending on power, flash unit, etc. (ETA: On my flash, I looked it up, it’s anywhere from 1/1000 - 1/40000 sec) Once the flash duration ends, the rest of the 2 seconds is not recording any meaningful exposure, since there is not enough ambient light to illuminate it and get recorded on the sensor. See Picture 1. The picture taken above with just the flash and grill would look pretty much exactly the same whether at 1/250 second or 2 seconds, since the flash is pretty much the only light source that is being recorded by the sensor. Now, if I had a one or two minute exposure, you would see the initial flash exposure (as above), but also a ghosted/blurred exposure of the grill, sky, chair, etc., as that is long enough of an exposure for the ambient light to register on the sensor (or film – it works the same either way.)
Now, once I make that initial exposure, all I have to do with the rest of the two seconds of my exposure is move my camera over to the left where the dog illuminated by the flashlight is. I don’t have to worry about the grill, sky, chair, etc., showing up in my frame, as the exposure is far too short for them to register. I just need to put the dog somewhere in the frame where it is black (or near enough to black) so it shows up easily against the background.
Here, for example, is where I overshot a bit and ended up with my dog superimposed on the grill:
Since the grill itself is black, he shows up pretty easily on it, but, say, the grill was white or I was shooting against a white wall, you’d hardly, if at all, be able to see him, as the white would overpower the frame.
I hope that makes some sort of sense. If you have further questions, let me know.
Maybe not , maybe the teenager in the photo is a special, even a one off… you like Jesus or Bhuddha or Mohammud.
But the photo shows nothing so unique… its a simple photographic technique, a bad fake
Lets see…
AIM: to photograph spirts
Method… 1. Shine a strong light across the scene,
2. Use a very long shutter time, eg 30 seconds
2a… During the long exposure, Use a flash to get the background visible too.
3. If nothing spooky in shot , repeat with a camera turn involved.
4. If result not suitable, get someone to “test” the idea by sticking their face in the way. ( This probably wasn’t written down.)
Result… The pictures speak for themselves…
(The camera turning was particular jerky and not in a simple turn… they went up and down… perhaps purposely to hide the fact it was the camera changing position that created the lines… In one shot, the person pressing the flash button put himself in shot, or just put themselves in shot on purpose. )
Conclusion… Souls were revealed escaping the body…
OR a very live person put their face in shot, and the turning of the camera made the long blurry lines out of bright things in the shot, eg clothing belt buckles, seat belt buckles, bottles and other reflective things… showed up as lines…
Um, the whole point about a spirit is that it has no material form. It’s purely spiritual. It won’t reflect light. if you can photograph it, it’s pretty much by definition not a spirit.
Yeah, a friend of mine and I would open the shutter on bulb at night and wander around with our hand over the lens, then try to draw things (like a flag) by finding a blue light for example and trying to use it to fill in the top left, then finding a red light and using it to draw a cross etc. Our efforts were normally best described as “mediocre” but we had fun.