Time Lapse
Ghostly, she drifts
over the green of the grass
and the bodies that decay.
Her fingers
trail over the letters
carved, yet faded away.
As she slips
out of vision and sound,
her ghostly presence remains.
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This was the first time I ever shot double exposure, and I genuinely didn't know how it was going to turn out until the film came back. I shot it across a few different graveyards around the city, which gave me a mix of gravestones, architectural details, and textures to layer figures over.
The bright, vivid clothing was intentional — I wanted something alive and saturated set against all that grey stone and stillness. It's not meant to be morbid. It's more about how a person moves through a space that's entirely about permanence, and how that movement, however brief, still leaves something behind. The ghosting effect from the double exposure ended up doing a lot of that work on its own — figures showing up half-there, overlapping with the stone like they're passing through rather than standing still.
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Shot entirely on Kodak Gold 200, which held up well for this since I needed a film that wouldn't blow out highlights once two exposures were stacked on top of each other. Each frame got shot twice on the same piece of film — first the graveyard itself, the stones and architectural details, then I manually rewound and shot the figure in motion over that same frame.
Because I was stacking two exposures into one frame, I underexposed each layer by about a stop to keep the highlights from burning out once they combined. I had no real reference for how this would look beforehand, so a lot of it was trial and error — guessing where the figure would land relative to the stone, hoping the ghosting effect showed up the way I pictured it. Shooting shallow depth of field helped keep some separation between the moving figure and the static background, even once the two exposures overlapped.
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Model | Abigail Grohmann
HMUA | Andie Peirce -
Lavonne Magazine (2016)
