Is that REALLY an orb in my
picture? That depends on what you mean
by orb!
Mark Taylor 12/1/2007
I set out to show visually
something that I have know for quite some time, but something that it seems
many people are being misled about.
Those who swear orbs are proof of something metaphysical may have a more
interesting story, but do you want entertainment, or to know the truth? Be prepared to explain why you think it’s dust next time someone tells you they caught an orb
with their camera.
I started with about 10 feet
of medium sized white thread of 37% cotton and 63% polyester. Next to a dime, it looks pretty thin. (The
dime shot was taken with my DSLR and a 100mm macro lens.) Now, please take
careful note of the extremely fine fibers which are straying from the sides.
I’ll be mentioning them again later.
I tied one end of this
thread to the branch of a plant in the back yard. The other end was tied to one of the deck
supports. I then took a few pictures
with a Pentax Optia
A20. It’s a nice compact 10 Megapixel digital camera that I keep with me when I am not
carrying the DSLR and all it’s lenses. This picture illustrates numerous points that
I’d like to make about digital photography in general. The camera was positioned just above the
thread, with the thread touching the bottom of the camera. On this camera, the flash is above and to the
right of the lens as you are taking the picture. Notice how the thread appears to start in the
middle of the picture? The flash was not
able to illuminate all of the thread, so it disappeared leaving only the dark
grey coat sleeve visible. The end of the
thread was tied off behind me. You’ll just have to trust me that it wasn’t
simply hovering in mid air as the picture appears to show.
Notice how thick it appears
right at the point where it disappears?
This is because it is out of focus.
Things that are out of focus will appear larger than they really are,
until you get past the point where the light is so spread out that you can’t
discern it from the background. I’ll
illustrate this more clearly farther down the page.
Remember those very fine
fibers hanging off the side of the thread next to the dime? They don’t look so small in this picture
“near” my wrist. If a small piece of
something this size was floating free in the air, it will reflect enough light
to show up, and would look like an orb.
Notice how the fibers appear more like connected balls of light than a
fiber? This has to do with the way that
the camera treats oddball pixels.
(Pixels that are very different from
surrounding pixels.) In the digital
processing of the image by the camera, the camera does some “smoothing”
operations to reduce “noise.” If one
pixel is pure white, and the pixels on all sides of it are pure black, then the
camera treats the white pixel as an anomaly of some sort, and will darken it so
that it does not stand out so much. On a
pure black picture, if there is one pure white pixel, it will NOT make it onto
the memory card as pure white. The camera may darken it a little, or a lot, or
it may even darken it so much that you can’t find it in the finished picture.
Even if the focus was perfect, and no white light hit any other pixels on the
sensor, the camera will do some smoothing.
The final decision will depend on the software (or firmware) built into
the camera, the number of pure white pixels, the number of pure black pixels,
and a host of other things. The details
of this go way beyond the scope of this article, but
trust me, your pictures turn out much better because of this smoothing and
averaging process.
If more than one pixel is
pure white, then the camera treats it as useful detail information, and may
even start to lighten some of the black pixels to smooth the image. Smoothing is good, as it makes pictures
appear less harsh. Too much detail is
not usually a good thing. Look at
yourself in the mirror from 10 feet away.
Now move to 6 inches away. Which
image would you want on the cover of a magazine, the one from a few feet away,
or the one from 6” away where you can count the number of pores on your nose?
If you want to see an
extreme example of a different averaging process on your own digital camera,
place a piece of pure black paper on the table next to a piece of pure white
paper. Turn the flash on your camera
off. Take a picture of the black paper
so that there is nothing visible except the black paper. Zoom in really close, nothing else should be
visible in the edges of the photo, just black paper over every pixel. Then take a picture of the white paper, same
way, white paper over every pixel. Look
at each picture in your camera’s review screen.
They look almost the same. On
some digital cameras, you can’t tell which is black and which is white. The camera adjusts the exposure so that the
average brightness is a predetermined level which ends up making both of them appear grey. There
may be some color cast, depending on the lighting, but both will be some
version of grey, VERY far from pure black and pure white.
The camera is programmed to
keep pictures from being too dark or too light.
This is normally a good thing. If
you shoot both papers together, in the same frame, it will look much more
normal, since the camera can do its averaging thing. The camera tries to make
sure that a very small percentage of the picture is pure black, and a very
small percentage is pure white. If more
than a very small percentage of the picture is pure white, it will speed up the
exposure to darken everything. If more
than a very small bit of the picture is pure black, it will lengthen the
exposure to lighten everything. This is a pretty simplified version of what
happens, with lots of details left out, but it explains what happens to your
pictures.
Back to
the picture above.
Depending on your monitor,
and its settings, you may or may not be able to see the string passing between
my index and middle finger. If you can
see it, it doesn’t look white. My
fingers are 30 inches away from the lens of the camera, and even something as relatively thick as
this thread almost doesn’t make it in the picture. What is there is so darkened by the cameras
averaging process that you can’t recognize it as white thread, if you can see
it at all. If it was a 1mm length of
this thread, do you think you’d ever see it in the finished picture? It might end up in the final picture, but
you’d have a hard time finding it.
Forget about seeing those little fibers, they were gone before the
string was even 2 feet away. Dust the
size of those fibers will float for hours once stirred up, and can be stirred
up by almost anything moving. Think you are in a dust free environment? If it is dark, and you shine a 500,000
candlepower light ahead of you, you will see all kinds of things floating in
the air. If they are less than 2 feet
from this particular camera, they will show up in the flash as an orb. If they are beyond 2 feet, then they will be
in focus, but since this is only a 10 Megapixel
camera, the size of the dust would be too small to register enough light on any
of the pixels to show up.
So basically, out of focus
dust shows up as orbs of varying sizes when in a dark environment and a flash
is used, or if it is in focus, it doesn’t show up at all. The only possible way for dust to show up IS
as an orb. (unless
it is actually STUCK on your lens or sensor, in which case it will be a dark
spot on multiple pictures.)
Next item: I’ve heard people talking about some orb
pictures where the orb was partially obscured by some other object, thereby proving
it was farther away from the camera than the other object. It sounds logical, but we have to remember
that the camera will average pixels with surrounding pixels. In the second picture, where the string
starts to disappear, you see a mixture of the white string and the dark grey
jacket. The camera is beginning to lose
it confidence that the white should be white, and is starting to mix in some of
the surrounding dark grey. If you looked
with your eyes at the string when the flash went off, you’d see an abrupt
change from bright white string to the non-illuminated dull white string. The camera smoothes abrupt changes, like
these, so it end up looking like it is fading out to the color of the
background.
Now, the non-illuminated
string doesn’t stand out very much at all from the dark grey coat, so the
camera just makes it all dark grey. In this same way orbs are only visible in
the darker portions of photos. If the
diffused light of the orb overlaps anything lighter in color, it loses some or
all of its ability to affect the color of the lighter object. Another example of this is that you can see
the string between my fingers, but you can’t see it against my middle
finger. There is more of a difference
between the string and the black background, so it mixes the two, and you end
up with something that is neither white nor black. When the string then transitions to the
background of the color of my finger, the camera averages it right out. If it was an orb, and not a string, it would
look like it was “behind” my finger, or that my finger was blocking the camera
from seeing it.
Last thing I can think of
for now… Objects out of focus will
appear on more pixels, and hence appear larger.
In the pictures below, you are looking at a roll of black electrical
tape. (These shots were taken with the
DSLR.) The white strip you see running horizontally is the reflection from the
ceiling light. The camera was held in
the same position for all 4 shots. The
only difference was that I was manually adjusting the focus of the lens. Notice how the camera makes the dark part
above the light reflection smaller and smaller, as it makes the light
reflection larger and larger. If I was
able to adjust the focus just a bit farther out, the black portion about the
reflection would have been gone. Also,
notice the small bit of black on the very edge of the light “bar” in the first
picture. These little bits of black on
the end of the bar will become round as the camera goes out of focus. They are not round to begin with, but as the
focus is lost, those become round, and the more out of focus, the larger they
become. Dust may not actually be round, but when it is out of focus,
it will appear are round orbs. Now,
notice the sharp top edges. In the second picture they are already rounded off,
and it’s not even that far out of
focus yet.
That’s all I can think of
for now. Feel free to email me with your
agreement, disagreement, questions, answers, ideas for
more pictures, whatever you have! I want
this post to be a starting point for a learning experience for all of us. Did I make a mistake somewhere, or leave
something out, or do I need to explain something further, whatever. Message me, or leave a comment. Any intelligent comment, complaint, criticism,
or debate is welcome. If I don’t know
the answer, I’ll try to find out. If you
DO know the answer, tell me so we’ll both know!
Most of us are after the
same thing, proof of something more than science has historically admitted
exists. Let’s not be distracted by silly
things such as dust reflecting our strobes.
Let’s get those pictures that really mean something!
My next
report? Why do orbs show up SO much more often on
small compact digitals, and not as much on DSLRs? That has to do with aperture settings, and
will be a long explanation. I’ll get
that one posted within the week, hopefully!
Contacting me:
N3tel2
at Comcast dot net