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Please note: copyright of these photographs belongs to the photographer.
They have given permission for the photos to be used on this website only.
The images may not be downloaded and reproduced elsewhere.

Orb photos!

Photo 1 as received, cropped from original. (We also received the full image, and there's nothing important missing.)

This is a classic example of a particle of dust caught by the camera's flash and reflected back as a highlight, recording in the digital camera as an "orb". There is really nothing supernatural about these photographs, but we have included them here as some of the best and most interesting orb photos we have received.

Notable in Photo 1 is that the baby is apparently looking straight at the orb. Can she see something we can't? Not in this case. The orb is mere centimetres from the camera lens and the baby is looking at something else. This misleading sense of depth comes from the photograph rendering the three-dimensional world in two dimensions. There is no clue to depth regarding the orb, but we know it is small and close, not the size of an orange and metres away.

For a further explanation of how orb photographs occur, please read this article.

Photo 2 as received, note as per above photo.

This one has terrific detail. The patterning in the orb is a combined function of lens optics, digital sensor design, digital sharpening applied by the camera and compression of the image file. The blue colour may be to do with the optical coating of the lens; I'm not sure about that one.

Enlargements of the orb areas of these two photos are shown below. Pixels have been added in Photoshop, and the images have been brightened using Levels and sharpened 100% using Unsharp Mask.

The patterns are rather fascinating, and it's not hard to see human and animal faces in them. This effect is called pareidolia, simulacrum or matrixing.

Return to Photos page   Orbs explained