High Heels Ghost

I took this on a Saturday night, tripod low, exposure long. The street was busy but silent—one of those moments when you hear the city breathe between footsteps and engines. She passed quickly, dressed for somewhere else, but the shutter stayed open just long enough to erase her features and leave only motion.

She became a spectre. Legs firm, heels sharp, but the torso blurred into translucence. It wasn’t planned. I wanted to catch life, but what emerged was absence—graceful, flickering, unresolved. That duality between presence and erasure fascinated me.

Compositionally, it’s a static stage: parked cars, rough bark, municipal geometry. The frame’s symmetry anchors the chaos of the motion blur, which slices diagonally through the scene like a passing thought. The urban palette—muted greys, sodium vapour yellows, dusty greens—lets the ghost float untethered from context. She could be anyone. That’s the point.

From a technical standpoint, it rides the edge. Too much movement and the figure becomes unrecognisable noise; too little and it’s just a street shot. Here, I think, the balance holds. It’s not tack-sharp, nor should it be. The detail is in the ghosting. The narrative lives in what’s missing.

Ghosts walk among us—dressed up, moving fast, half-visible.

This is what Saturday night leaves behind.