Night Photography and Ghost Portraiture

During my time in West Virginia some years ago, I had the honor of assisting a photographer named George Bragg, who worked with GEM Photography. He was an ex coal-miner turned photographer and he helped me learn more about landscape photography, but also, how to photograph at night. George passed away about a year ago, but I’ll never forget his lessons.

Lesson one:

When photographing at night, use a tripod, light your subject, and take long exposures.

Lesson two:

When taking a long exposure with the shutter open for about twenty seconds, go stand the image really still for about half that time before moving out of the image in order to render a ghost portrait.

HDR Stream in West Virginia

While sorting through old photographs yesterday in the archive and cleaning/rearranging files, I came across this set of bracketed landscape images with long exposures of water I took while checking out some of the historic and forgotten back roads of West Virginia. This one was off McKendree Road, considered McKendree, West Virginia (unincorporated).

McKendree Road, West Virginia

There’s a bridge over it that water was spilling off of onto the other side. I used that shot for an altered landscapes composite project for a college assignment at the time, and this was just a lovely landscape behind it that I captured as a personal bonus.

I do not recall my exact settings on the camera for this image, but I can tell you basically how it was created:

I set up the camera on a sturdy tripod.

I bracketed 5-7 images from darker to lighter exposures.

All of the exposures were long in order to cater the water’s movement.

I merged the bracketed images during editing and performed some color corrections.

That’s it!