This was shot at 1:41 AM, no flash

There’s this haunted house down Skelton Road. When we’re bored we occassionally break in there and scare ourselves. These shots are taken therein with a 15-30 second shutter. It was 1:30 in the morning and we could barely see ahead of ourselves, but the photos look like daylight. Some very strange, still daylight, but this LX3 lets in a lot of light. In the photo above, for example, you can see the blades and color of the grass, which I couldn’t see with my naked eye.You can’t really take photos of people with a shutter that long (cause we move), but there’s one here where everyone just stood still and it came out. Keep in mind that this is pitch dark, and yet you can read the number on a license plate yards away.

The interior. Very Prince of Persia

See? There are ghosts.

House

Per the house, I’ve driven past it for years and always wondered. It’s a shell of a building, but enormous. The tower is like five stories high. The columns stretch for two. Completely tacky and horrid, can’t imagine how any human would live there. But still an amazing shell of a building. Past the columns, there’s a curving stair leading up, like some drug dealer’s opulent causeway. There’s no railing and it’s a two-story drop down into the basement. There are no visible supports.

The basement is dark and weird and has these little chambers. Also found some abandoned furniture there. Can stay there for a while but inevitably some idiot makes a noise or throws something and you actually get scared.

Then there’s this elevator shaft and zig-zagging stairs leading up. Again, no railing and a pretty significant drop. There’s weirder and weirder shit on each floor. On one there’s like some stagnant water groto and an obscenely huge balcony. On the top there’s a swimming pool, abandoned like everything else. The tower goes up a floor further. There are also a few ways to get up and down, but some of them are missing pretty essential chunks and require some, er, navigation.

Broke in there once and found that it wasn’t haunted, there was an actual caretaker staying there. He got worked up and was like ‘what are you doing, i’ll call the police’ (with what phone?) but as he was walking out he figured out that we were just a bunch of tipsy kids and he started laughing. Then he walked us back in and showed us around. He said there was some property dispute and the owner had given up. I forget the details, was in Sinhala. Nav Rat would know. But it’s a standard story, there’s abandoned lots everywhere, usually magnificent in their waste. There’s another fanta abandoned on Ward Place just up from ODEL, but I never broke in there. They’re tearing it down now and I feel pangs of regret.

A local boy/girl band I found wandering the streets

Camera

Per the photos, they’re taken on a Panasonic LX3 on the manual setting. I set the aperture to 2 cause I think that’s the biggest, uh, camera hole available (?). The thing is the shutter speed (other examples). There isn’t enough light to take a photo on normal speed (like 1/10 of a second or whatever), but if you leave it open for one second you get, effectively, 10 times the light. I leave it open for like 15-30 seconds which goes beyond capturing reality to capturing something else entirely. In this case the camera captures something better than the naked eye. The only catch is people, and the shake of my own hand. People move too much for low-light. People don’t sit still for 1/10th of second, let alone 15. But they can. Like one shot above, and as all photography was in the 1800s and stuff. They’d just put you in front of a box and tell you to sit still, with your head in a clamp.

The photos are available in high resolution on Flickr. Can click ‘All Sizes’ on any individual photo page.

Posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 in Colombo, Friends, Photography, Sri Lanka.