Beyond the Limits of Reason: double exposure

These three photographs were made using the same camera, in the same room, utilizing the same subject: my very patient and always willing subject, the plant I lovingly have named Lazarus, after the biblical figure who rose from the dead. Lazarus the Orchid came into my life three or four years ago. This orchid has returned from what I believed was death, to bloom and flower again, over and over. This re-flowering, this rebirth, always inspires me to observe and celebrate and create a new round of photographs.

The top image is the most visually conventional, on the surface, yet even it is a couple of steps away from a traditional photograph: looking closely, the viewer detects ghostly double images within the frame.

The second image was made with a pinhole "lens", rather than an actual glass lens. The long exposure time, thirty seconds (due to the tiny f162 aperture through which light strikes the sensor), resulted in a bit of softening of the floral detail.

The third and final image is also a pinhole photograph; it varies from the second image due to a sense of overall Dionysian energy and fecundity, almost from a bug's-eye perspective.

This first image is a double-exposure, and has been fully processed from a single, in-camera RAW file into a final TIFF after editing. I then made the reduced size JPEG you are looking at for internet purposes.

I've included two photographs here: The smaller photo is more-or-less a straight out of camera image with minimal processing. The larger photograph is edited using, post-digital-processing and what I can only call "handwork" in Lightroom and Photoshop. The camera I use, a full-frame DSLR, allows for the production of multiple exposures on the same file, producing a RAW original.This image was a double exposure. I've done a bit of work increasing contrast, applying both minus clarity AND plus dehaze, and slight variations to a magenta, blue, and yellow color channels. I also tried split toning with color to add a color cast to the shadows and highlights. I still consider the final, processed image to be the truer expression of my internal, pre-conceived ideal. The expressive power of the image is finalized and made manifest in the 'digital darkroom', just as in days past the true vision of the analog photographer was made "real" in the analog darkroom. My photographs are not ABOUT the process, but they can't exist without it. That is why I occasionally share these details, since I normally prefer to speak only of the 'content', however one defines that slippery term. For me content refers more to intentions than objects.