Through the Ghost Lens

[Tree shimmer, mist and dark sky]

This one came out of a family weekend. Not a dedicated shoot, I don’t get a whole of time for that these days. Just a camera in my bag and eyes open, the way it usually goes. The difference this time was the lens filter. A triple multi filter, which layers and refracts the light in a way that produces something I wasn’t quite expecting and immediately liked.

Ghostly. That’s the only word for it.

[Forest lines, pylons in the mist]

The effect splits and bleeds elements of the scene, doubling up edges, softening what should be sharp, adding a kind of spectral quality to ordinary things. Telegraph poles and cables become something almost cinematic. Trees on a hillside take on the feeling of a half-remembered dream. The filter invents artefacts that aren’t there, it reveals the scene as it might look in the moment between sleeping and waking.

Combined with the deep contrast I tend to push in black and white, the results are sitting somewhere I really like. Dark foregrounds, luminous ghostly mist catching behind silhouettes, skies heavy with weather. Aberdeenshire does a lot of the work for you if you’re patient enough to wait for the right time.

[From the bridge over the Spey]

This one stopped me in my tracks. Standing on the bridge over the Spey, almost looks like mist sitting low between the trees on both banks, the river pulling everything toward the middle of the frame. The overhead cables cutting across the top of the shot are the kind of thing you might clone out in editing, but I left them. They add a tension to it, a human mark on a landscape that looks ancient and indifferent to us being there.

The filter may have un-naturally invented mist and shimmer but I feel it gave the whole scene an uncertainty, like you’re not quite sure if you’re looking at a photograph or a painting or something else entirely.

I’ll be using this a lot more.

Sam