Emily's picture picked up a disturbance down near the door of Studio 408
It's not everyday that you have a paranormal investigator visit your place of work, so when 612's Spencer Howson invited Emily Cadiz from the Queensland Paranormal Investigators into the studio for Halloween, he made sure she did a thorough check of the office.
And what was she checking for? Ghosts, of course. Emily was carrying her 'ghost detector', which searches for magnetic energy in the air, and after she spent half an hour wandering through the 612 office, she could find nothing that indicated that there might be unhappy spirits around.
"I don't feel - just on my wanderings around here - that there are any ghosts here," Emily said at the time, apologetically.
However, Emily also brought with her a camera, and now that she's had a chance to examine the pictures she took, she's found something very suspicious (see right).
In email, Emily explained:
The arrow is pointing to what is called an 'orb in motion'. Now orbs aren't a ghost in themselves, but they the are balls of energy. It is thought that this is how ghosts travel when they are not manifesting themselves into the forms we recognise more as ghosts.
Sometimes dust, pollen, cigarette smoke and other environmental factors can appear in photos but none of those factors were present at the studio and this is the only photo with anything like this is in it - and right outside Studio 408! The orb is also showing movement which means it was travelling quite fast considering the shutter speed was quite high.
In summary, it means there was an unexplained energy in this photo that didn't appear anywhere else. Haunted? Not entirely sure yet, but the chance is always there...
The next morning in the studio, she added that ghosts tend to travel as 'orbs'. "It takes a lot of energy for ghosts to manifest as we would be able to see them, so when they?re just flitting about from here to there, they?re much smaller, and that?s when they draw on the electrical energy that I was talking about the other day ? that?s what they use to gain more energy and then manifest."
She's reasonably convinced the spot is an orb. "One of the signs we look for in determining whether it?s dust or an actual orb is the fact I wasn?t using a flash here, and that?s usually when you?ll pick up dust or other things in the atmosphere, because it reflects off the flash, but this one?s actually admitting its own light."
There was an unexplained energy in this photo that didn't appear anywhere else. Haunted? Not entirely sure yet
Our listeners weren't so sure. Neil thought the 'orb' might be a flare. "It's possible the 'orb' in Emily Cadiz's photograph is a flare in the camera lens, caused by a light source from what appears to be a window at the end of the corridor," he suggests. "It could also be some artifact produced when the digital camera's electronics processed the image as it was taken....
"I'd suspect that if the image was analysed by a photograpic expert, there'd be a logical (optical or electronic) explanation for the 'orb'," Neil says.
So we asked professional photographer Mark Straker what he thought of the image (we sent him the one Emily had provided to us - a larger, but low-res image). Here are his comments:
The 'orb' is almost certainly the result of lens flare.
Lens flare is caused by stray (outside the field of view) light entering the lens and being reflected from the interior of the lens onto to film (or imaging device on digital cameras).
The reason the 'orb' looks like it was in motion is because it is actually two bits of flare overlapped. Because modern camera lenses are made from multiple lens elements, lens flare regularly occurs like this when the stray light is reflected or refracted at a slightly different angle by the different lens elements.
Lens flare such as 'the orb' is significantly reduced by using lens hoods, so maybe your ghost whisperer might be able to try hunting for ghosts again after fitting a lens hood - the larger the better.
So what do you think? Orb or lens flare?
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