Orbs... A load of balls?

I thought I’d kick off my blog with a really contentious issue amongst the paranormal community. Orbs. Many people believe that orbs are 'spirit' attempting manifestation or an indication that an area contains a great amount of psychic energy. Indeed many have centred their whole investigative career around capturing orbs on camera. Personally, I think the real explanation is rather more mundanely normal as opposed to ‘paranormal’.

Orbs are the grey or white circles, occasionally opaque, sometimes translucent that appear on predominantly digital photos (although they occasionally crop up in 35mm shots too.) The main feature is that they weren’t in the shot when the shot was taken but somehow show up when the picture is viewed. This is the reason many people thought they were paranormal.

It was soon realised early on that the same effect could be reproduced by blowing dust or other similar particles in front of the lens when photographs are taken. Camera manufacturers offered a similar ‘circles of confusion’ explanation. A circle of confusion is basically an out of focus highlight. They are more noticeable in photos with a dark background or in low levels of light. Such as you would expect from photographing a dusty old haunted house at night!

A circle of confusion is the smallest detail a lens can resolve. When it is projected onto a film (35mm) or sensor chip (digital) it appears as a circular dot. These are purposely made small enough so that they cannot be seen as individual dots on the final photo. Instead the picture appears as a continuous shape rather than lots of individual dots.

All objects reflect light. That’s the theory behind photography. Imagine taking a photograph of something and with each successive photo making it slightly more out of focus. As it goes further out of focus it appears to turn into many overlapping circles of light. The brightest circles are produced by highlights on the object that outshine the darker ones completely. Any object that reflects light will always reflect the predominant colour of the light-source. In the case of a camera’s flash it is white.

As the object becomes further out of focus the dots expand to appear as circles. The bigger the circle the fainter it appears because the light is more diffused. Eventually the circle becomes too large and is no longer visible at all. This is why you will never see orbs bigger than one tenth of the frame size of the picture. If orbs were real they wouldn’t have such limits. Any circles of light bigger than one tenth frame size are usually attributed to lens flare, which is a bright light source close to the lens. An example of this is taking a flash photo through a window.

So why did orbs suddenly make an appearance with the introduction of the digital camera? For the simple reason that people were witnessing first hand what professional photographers had been annoyed with for years. Because digital cameras enabled people to see what they had taken instead of waiting for the films to be developed, circles of confusion (orbs), began to be noticed. Up until then developers would just write off the shot as ‘unsuitable’ because of the orb in shot so the photo wouldn’t be included in the returned set of pictures.

All cameras can produce orbs. Although digital cameras are more susceptible to producing them because of their physically smaller sensor chips in relation to 35mm film frame, sometimes up to a half smaller. This meant that lenses with smaller circles of confusion were needed for digital cameras compared to film cameras. A consequence of this is that the digital lenses had a far greater depth of field.

Depth of field is the area in front of the camera where objects are in focus. If the object is too close to the lens, or too far away they will be out of focus and begin to break up into circles of confusion. This means that in the case of digital cameras the closest distance where objects were in focus came much nearer to the camera. It also brought the area that was just out of focus nearer to the flash unit.

So if you took a photograph of a dark room with tiny airborne particles that were close enough to the lens to be out of focus and be highly illuminated by the flash you would produce orbs. Unseen to the naked eye yet picked up in shot as glowing balls of diffuse light.

Various factors affect the brightness, structure, appearance of internal shapes (i.e. faces), edge sharpness and evenness of shading. Professional photographers explain this phenomenon as ‘bokeh’ of a lens.

If a photo were to be taken of an observed light source anomaly; the camera would pick it up as an intense white ball of light because of the darkened conditions. It is unlikely that a dimly lit semi translucent energy source would appear dimly lit.

Orbs are usually produced in photos requiring a flash but can also be produced without one. Orbs can appear in front of something in focus but can also be taken with something behind them. Its interesting to note that the object behind them is usually out of focus too.

Orbs are usually singular but several can be appear in a picture; they can appear as multiple overlapping orbs too…this is caused by objects with several highlights. The vast majority are white or grey but occasionally can be other colours. This is caused by light reflecting off a particularly brightly coloured nearby object. Orbs can appear to have a tail with apparent upwards movement this is caused by taking a photo of a falling raindrop. Occasionally orbs may look like they cast a shadow; this can be explained by the addition of a coincidental dark shape or over-processing. Orbs can even look like they are behind objects in focus. This is caused by the in focus object refracting more light and a clearer image than the illuminated particle near to the camera.

Here’s a simple test to see how much airborne particulate is in a seemingly dust-free room. Turn the lights off. Turn a torch on and watch those particulates go!