Sunday, October 6, 2024

Double Exposure on Film: the Quantum Spacetime of Photography?

 



 

It will be Halloween soon and yesterday there was the Fall Arts show downtown.  It was time for my 1979 Mamiya 645 1000s to get some exercise hanging from my neck while walking around.

I came across a re-enactment of how Prescott was in the 1800s, and decided to take a few photos.

After I clicked once, a young man came to me curious about my camera.

“That is an antique!” he started, “and I could hear the shutter from 20 feet away.”

“It is the large mirror falling,” I said “yes, old medium format cameras are not made for photo taking during a piano concerto.”

“My Nikon is mirrorless,” he proudly continued, “It is the latest technology.”

I slowly winded the film turning the noisy winding crank.

“And it has a crank?!”

“It does, just like cars had in the 1920s” I said in a serious tone.

“So, you use film, an antique camera with a crank, and try to focus through a waist screen. Tell me, why?”

“I suppose for the same reason some people still enjoy driving and repairing vintage cars – for the companionship between tool and user.”

He started laughing and I noticed he had perfect teeth.

“Do you drive a vintage car?”

“Well, mine will qualify as vintage in 4 years and I will get a plate that says so” I responded.

At this point he was keen on seeing my photos.

“Can I find you on Facebook? Instagram? Snapchat?”

“Tell you what, you will not find me on any of these sites. But I will give you the link too my blog – check it out after a couple of days, since it will take me that long to develop the film, hang it to dry, then use my 1950s enlarger in the darkroom to print photos, hang them to dry, then scan them so I can post on my blog.”

“And now a blog!” he exclaimed. “Yes, I will check.”

 

After he left, I wondered what my antique camera can do that his mirrorless wonder cannot. As I was in thought, my eyes fell upon the “MULTI” switch on the right of the camera body. That is for taking multiple exposures on the same film frame. I had used it once decades ago just to try it and the photos I got were not for street photography. Maybe for creative landscape shots, but not for capturing events in the streets.

I had no idea if modern digital cameras can take multiple exposures on the sensor they harbor. But I decided to try it on film.

… The photo at the outset is a double exposure – I switched the lever to “MULTI” took one shot, cocked the shutter via the crank which now did not advance the film, and took another shot a few seconds after the first one. Of course by then my camera hold had slightly shifted and the enactors had moved. So I had no idea what to expect, and even if that function still was working on the Mamiya.

I find it an interesting composition, and of course I love the Mamiya Sekor 150mm lens I used.

The woman shading her eyes from the sun has a second “her” superposed lower, as my hold of the camera was lower for the second shot. But she had already moved making the photo sequence an active one. Par contre, the woman on the right had remained still, perfectly. The tree branches are almost symmetrically placed in both shots, although the post upon which the first woman is resting her left hand has a slight displacement due to my camera movement between the shots. And, to the background of the first woman one can discern a cowboy hat, and a woman with an umbrella.

The most interesting movement is the man with a cowboy hat that is seen right in line behind the head of the first woman and who was not in the frame with the first shot – he had just walked by during the seconds between the two shots!

 

The photo at the outset was the first print I did of that frame by exposing the photographic paper 10 seconds under the enlarger light. The dark areas were contrasty but seem to be hiding more people and events. So, I tried another print this time with 8 seconds exposure.  Here is that photo:



This underexposed version tells a very different story – the woman with umbrella was there all along holding hands with the man wearing a cowboy hat, but the 10 seconds enlarger light exposure had totally covered them in black! Now, we can see them both in the first shot, and also in the second superimposed one as they too had moved forward and do not seem to be holding hands. What I love about this detail is that we now have the couple in profile in the first frame and in portraiture in the second – lovely!

 

… As I looked at the two printed photos and the magic of double exposure on film, I could not resist thinking about the concept of timespace in Quantum Mechanics. Simply put, some aspects of our space and time that are continuous, freeze or stop “commuting”.  Time is certainly a commuting concept – it moves forward, but also can go back. Space is less easily understood as changing, unless one thinks about the warping and expanding of the space concept proposed by Einstein.

Quantum spacetime puts these two concepts together and proposes that what was fluid, changing or moving can stop being so, or they get “quantized” – hence the term “Quantum.”

Well, in double exposed film frames, the movement and the space around the movement have been frozen yet we know they moved. And the resulting new form, as if timespace, is now broken into smaller segments. In a funny way, I think about this scenario as the “fabric of frozen movement” (my definition.)

 

… More importantly, I wonder if the young man will indeed check my blog and perhaps send me an email about his impression of the photos.

Or, maybe he just went to his friends and said:

Guess who I met today?  A photographer stuck in the 1950s! And he had to wind up his camera with a crank so it can shoot!!!”

 

October 6, 2024

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024



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