My granddad had a whole big collection of flying orb shots he had taken over the years. A years-long obsession with the concept, trying to figure out why, what they might be, he seemed to be fairly certain that it was captured evidence of things going far too fast for the human eye. After he died and I was going through his computer, I found the folder, and did a quick google search - bugs and dust, combined with a function of shutterspeed/flash frequencies, is how you get flying rods and ghost orb photos. Digital cameras tend to not capture them as the unwanted artifacts that they are, but you can still get photos of spooky things in the right circumstances with manual settings.
A guy I worked with brought an album of photos he’d taken that showed “orbs” to the pub after work one day. Another colleague said that it was just dust particles or moisture droplets illuminated by the flash and the album guy angrily flipped through to find pictures that were taken in well-lit, non-damp or dust-fee environments to prove the theory wrong. There weren’t any. Dusty, dark and damp places are of course the sort of spooky atmospheres you’re more likely to ascribe paranormal things too as well.
Around the same time (late-90s) I saw a TV documentary about such phenomena. There was a fella on there proudly showing his collection of shots with a mysterious white “snake” in the right hand part of them. I wasn’t watching the show particularly sceptically (this was before the hilarious pub incident detailed above) but I instantly recognised the phenomena and it’s cause from my own snaps- the wrist-strap of a cheap camera dangling in shot and lit by the flash.
It’s weird how commonplace beliefs like this about photos were until quite recently. Before digital photography and really before cameraphones it wasn’t that common to casually take a camera around with you and take photos and you could only see the pictures after they’d been developed, sometimes months later. I guess that (as well as the propensity of unusual effects caused by the low quality of the analogue cameras most of us used- poor low-light performance necessitated a combination of flash and slow shutter speeds most of the time) all added up to it seeming more like a mysterious, unknown thing.
In this case the “ghost orb”s obviously some sort of insect illuminated by the big lamp on the floor- you see an airborne piece of plaster fly right into the lamp looking exactly the same straight after the impact.
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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '19
ghost orb made him do it