LightLeak DX

Bring back the joy and wonder of accidental double exposure to your digital photographs with LightLeak DX. Advances such as Photoshop have turned us all into skilled revisionists. Now you can resubmit yourself to the joyful tyranny of the uncontrollable.

In the long ago age of analogue film, cameras were manually operated, and photographers had to remember to advance the film after each shot. When this operation was forgotten, it produced a double exposure on the negative. Multiple pictures became exposed into, and on top of, one another. Often the results were astonishing, funny, poetic and sometimes even prophetic. We had no control of how worlds would collide; it was kismet! Frequently the best part was trying to decipher these photos, which always resulted in the most unexpected interpretations!

LightLeak DX, is an iPhone App that brings back the joy, wonder and unexpected results of accidental double exposures to digital photography. The user will shoot a "roll" of film and LightLeak DX will "arrange" for random exposures to be combined. On each roll a certain number of shots will be selected and combined together randomly by the App itself. LikeLeak DX will choose, serendipitously. The photographer cannot control the selected multiple exposures, or disentangle them once they are made.

The user can set the application to shoot a short (12 shots) or a long roll (24 shots). Each roll will be saved to your phones picture album. When you choose to PROCESS a roll, the finished pictures will display as an album containing the multiple exposures. The user should expect to find at least 1/4 of the roll to be double exposed, and since the process is genuinely random the results will come as a complete surprise.

Having grown up in a family that snapped a lot of pictures, I remember we regularly took time to arrange them in photo albums. It was a family ritual, as was waiting to get to get prints back from the camera store. Even the lag time between the photographs making and their viewing, days later, subtlety changed our perception of the past, and its photographed events.

Todays digital camera experience, with its complete immediacy, provides instant gratification and great utility. And the rise of digital enhancements, like Photoshop, have allowed us to become skilled revisionists. However, we think being surprised by something unexpected and unimagined, might be the most fun of all.

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