The Camera Doesn’t Lie. It Just Tells Two Truths at Once.
I have a theory about double exposure photography. It doesn’t show you the world the way it is. It shows you the world the way it feels – layered, overlapping, two things occupying the same space at the same time. Which, honestly? Same.
Grabbed the Ricoh GRIIIx and took it down to the Little Squalicum waterfront to play. What came out of it was some of my favorite work I’ve done with this camera.
BNSF Is Always Doing Something Cinematic
I took the long way out. Down past the BNSF trestle, where hopper cars were rolling slow across the elevated line the way they always seem to – like they have nowhere urgent to be and all the time in the world to get there. The light was that particular sharp blue of a Pacific Northwest midday that feels almost too crisp to be real.
The GRIIIx was already set to multiple exposure mode before I left the car. That’s the deal I’ve made with this camera: no deliberating once you’re out there. You either commit to seeing two things at once, or you don’t.
I crouched under the elevated line where the ground is all driftwood and river stone, aimed up through the girders, and fired. Then I walked to the waterfront side and fired again without advancing the frame. The GRIIIx makes this almost too easy. It’s a purist’s camera in most ways, but the in-camera multiple exposure function has this uncanny way of previewing the ghost of your first image over whatever the lens is seeing – just faint enough to guide you without making all the decisions for you.
Low Tide Is a Whole Event
The tide was out by the time I reached the Squalicum waterfront. Low tide here is an event. The bay pulls back to expose acres of cobble and sand flat that shouldn’t exist, a temporary continent. I shot the mud flat layered against the bay horizon and in the resulting frame you can barely tell where water ends and sky begins. The cloud reflections pooled in the sand read as sky above while actual sky reads as something liquid and wavering.
Up is down. The photograph becomes a landscape that only exists inside the camera.
This is what I keep coming back for. Not documentation. Not memory exactly. Something more like the feeling of memory – that layered, slightly unreliable quality where you can’t always sequence things correctly but the emotional truth is right there, perfectly clear.
The Pier. My Pier. It Never Lets Me Down.
Little Squalicum Pier was the destination all along. It usually is. I don’t know exactly when this place became my safe place, but it is. I’ve walked out to the end of this pier more times than I can count – in rain, in fog, in the sharp midday light of March that turns the water silver and the mountains into something almost painted.
It’s where I go when something is too heavy to carry and too complicated to explain. Walk far enough out over the water and something shifts. The shore becomes abstract. Your problems do too. I’m genuinely grateful this pier exists and that it’s close and that it’s mine.
Why Not Just Use Photoshop To Stack Photos Like a Normal Person?
I get asked why I do this in camera instead of just blending in post. The honest answer: the discomfort of committing in the field is the point.
When you’re doing this on location, you’re making decisions without full information. You’re betting the birch branches will read through the trestle iron. You’re trusting that the cloud formation from twenty minutes ago still lives inside the new frame. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t quite work but the failure is interesting. Occasionally it does something you never would have designed at a computer because you never would have had the idea sitting in a warm room with a slider.
The imprecision is the technique. The seams showing is the aesthetic. It looks like memory because memory also layers things – blends tenses, puts the past just barely visible inside the present.
I stayed until the pier had given me what I came for, which is what it always does.
Same place soon, probably. Different frame.
Shot on Ricoh GRIIIx, 40mm. BNSF corridor + Little Squalicum Pier, Bellingham WA.
