How to shoot ghost effect

This tutorial is intended for beginner. Please don’t mind the terms I used if you are not one.

It is for sure making your model transparent is a piece of cake using Photoshop. One just need to select the model, and slide the transparency slider. Got it.

But what if you can make your life easier by shooting it that way straight from the camera ?

Yes there is a way. What you’ve seen above was published as is, not edited at all. Here’s the steps:

1. Mount the camera on tripod. You need something steady.
2. Set the camera to S (shutter priority) mode, and set it to 5″ or more. (depends on your need)
3. For the human model, make sure the model stay still inside the frame from the beginning until the exposure ended. (2nd shutter sound)
4. For the ghost model, stay outside the frame first.
5. Now click the shutter.
6. Transparent model get inside the frame halfway until the exposure ended.
7. That’s all. You got it.

Now here’s how it works: when you click shutter 1st time, it open. That’s when it start to ‘record’. Your human model should stay for the entire time so that he/she get full exposure. While your ghost model should only come in halfway through. Doing this makes the ghost model get only half the exposure, hence the transparent effect.

Please feel free to experiment. And remember, those are meant only for guidelines. Do try it out and let me know what you think.

Image courtesy of Erwin Dharmawan.

Tags: effect, flash, ghost, howto, night, photography, pixel