Chariots of God (Scripture & Photo Examined)

So, by the standards you are using, this, all by itself, is absolute proof that bigfoot exists?

I believe in big foot. I am sure that some of the photos and videos are faked because I have seen costumes of him. Have you seen costumes of spiritual orbs, ones with faces, and videos of ones in flight with faces? No. People are not trying to draw tourists to spend money with orbs. They are not faked. There is no money in faking the photographs and videos.

There's your problem right there--you "believe."I studied for several years in grad school under the only academic bigfoot expert in the US. I went on trips with him to see amateur films, and looked at all the evidence he had gathered over about 20 years of study.Even after seeing all that evidence I don't "believe" any of it. There is some interesting evidence, which has yet to be explained, but there is no "proof" that bigfoot exists. And belief doesn't enter the picture at all.Seems like you could profit from a healthy dose of skepticism and leave that belief stuff alone.

so, i don't know if ever particularly shared this before here, but.i'm a professional photographer. or at least semi-professional. it's not my full time job anymore because the contracts have dried up and i took up a day job, but i still take contracts on the side. i've got a bar mitzvah coming up in october, and hopefully some obstacle course races around the end of the year when the weather cools down.so, i'll correct a few misconceptions in this thread, and hopefully demonstrate that i know what i'm talking about.there's been a joke or two about "cleaning your lenses". dust etc on the front element of the lens does basically nothing. hell, you can usually crack the front element in half, and it won't mean much more than a blurry streak through your image. here's me after a tough mudder race: i spent all day being splashed by muddy ice water. what do you think my front element (or in this case, the filter in front of it) looked like? yeah, mud everywhere. that's my camera in the bag. here's a picture i shot of our local hockey team: my camera slipped out of the hole in the glass (it was my first time, okay) and i ended up shooting half through the hole and half through the glass, which is like 1/2 an inch thick, scuffed up, and generally gnarly (which is why they have holes for photographers). can you see the line where the glass stops and the hole begins? no, you just see a fuzzy blur in part of the image.the reason for this is called "depth of field" or sometimes "depth of focus" (DOF). within a particular range, things appear sharp. as they get further and further out of this range, the more diffuse they get. when something's right in front of the lens, and it's focused far away, it's basically so diffuse it's almost not there. i've used this fact in every baseball game i've ever shot because i'm shooting through fences.depth of field is controlled primarily by three factors, physical aperture size (or the combination of focal length over f/stop, same thing), distance from the camera, and circle of confusion. let's not get into the third one, because it's complicated, but suffice to say it's strictly related to sensor size and that i'm going to ignore for the rest of this post and i just like being technically correct.professional photographers are frequently concerned with something we call "bokeh" (pronounced bow keh), which is a subjective analysis of how a lens renders out-of-focus highlights. here's what some of those highlights look like when they are behind the point of focus: in this case, my lens is wide open, and i've racked the focus as close as possible so as to exaggerate the bokeh. this is not a crop, btw, this is the full image. these circles are basically "orbs" in that they are points of light, rendered as larger circles due to focus. you can see i'm managed to get some schmutz in there somewhere; it's probably not on the sensor, because with light coming in that diffuse, you shouldn't be able to see dirt on the sensor.anyways, as you close down the aperture, the aperture blades get involved, and the number and shape of them affect this out-of-focus "bokeh-balls", and this is the kind of stuff we photo geeks concern ourselves with. wide open, lenses will always give you circular bokeh (and "cat eye" shaped ones towards the edges), but stopped down you'll get regular polygons with the same number of edges as you have aperture blades, until diffusion sets in and you start getting stars. shape matters too, as rounded blades will make more circular and nicer looking bokeh. glass quality matters too. you can see some "onioning" in one of my bokeh-balls, but they're overall pretty flat. this is the mark of a good lens, with good coatings, and a good optical design.now, let's look at some stuff that causes "orbs" a bit more like you're used to seeing. here's spiderman. i shot this one at a superhero scramble, and they're coming down off a waterslide. note that this is an exceptionally difficult shot to expose for (it's like ten times brighter at the top of the slide than the bottom, and the camera meter hates the black slide covering), focus (you have to track them sliding, or the camera won't lock on fast enough) and time (seriously, how perfect is that goddamned pose). notice that the air is full of particulates, in this case (muddy) water. you can see i've focused reasonably okay on the subject, and that there are water droplets on the same plane as him, in front of him, and behind him, with varying degrees of sharpness relating to how far they are away. this image was shot, iirc, f/4 and 200mm, so we're talking a fairly large aperture, and fairly shallow DOF. notice that the ones in front kind of look like orbs?the effect is exaggerated when you account for lighting: this was a hazy day, on a field basically in the middle of the swamp. you can see the dust, pollen, sweat, etc being kicked up into the air, and i've shot this directly into the sunset (note the direction and length of the shadows). again, it's around 200mm, this time at f/2.8, so even bigger aperture. and look, orbs -- but they're clearly not anything different than we've already seen.so what happened in the image you posted, and why does it look so strange?as you can see in the wider shot (from youtube), the "orb" is in nearly the center of the image, accounting for its roundness. you can also see the shadows cast by the kids on their edges, meaning the light was on axis (like my last example above), except that this time it's coming from the camera. the principle is the same, whether the particulate is being illuminated from behind or the front, although it's going to be a lot more common in front-lit situations because shitty on-camera flash is pretty popular. this camera is probably very small, and the lens is almost certainly wide open to compensate for dim indoor lighting. with a particulate in the air between the subjects and the camera, this is the perfect recipe for an orb. the squiggliness of the orb is probably down to defects in the lens, and poor glass quality in a cheapo camera, along with a fair degree of pareidolia.basically, as a professional photographer, i see nothing particularly unusual here.(these are just pictures i happened to already have online, btw. orbs are fairly trivial to produce -- just got shoot with a flash at night in the rain, you get thousands of 'em)Edited by arachnophilia, : i accidentally a word.

Very informative, but your post raises a couple of questions in my mind.1) Why don't your orbs look anything like the stuff we can find all over the net?2) Why do other people manage to produce orbs by kicking up dust?I agree with your description of how the artifacts are generated, but it seems that tiny dust particles can work just as well as water droplets with the exception that the orbs generated with dust show a lot more 'internal features' than do yours.

The internal features are caused by lower quality lenses. Good ones produce nice smooth "orbs"

Ordinary objects in the natural world are still ordinary objects in the natural world, whether you know anything about the spirit world or not. What you're imagining in those photographs IS in the natural world and it WILL show up on those photographs whether there are spirits in the vicinity or not.And this is not a question of Christianity versus atheism. This is a question of reality versus fantasy. Other Christians don't see the same fantasies that you see either.

I know aliens are real because I have seen one. I know Jesus and angels are real because I have seen them. I know the Holy Spirit is real because I have seen Him with my naked eyes and have provided both pictures and videos of them.Edited by ScottRP, : No reason given.Edited by ScottRP, : No reason given.

deletedEdited by ScottRP, : No reason given.Edited by ScottRP, : No reason given.

Broken links.Shy little guys, eh?

You're very lucky. Most people don't get to see even one imaginary being. Tell me more about the aliens.

My god! They're real! They really are real!Scott, Can these guys look through clothes and see girls naked?

Even the Mexican government admits aliens are real.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKdvBidbwnQ

because in most of those cases, i'm shooting with thousands of dollars worth of glass. except for that exaggerated abstract looking one; i paid all of $60 for that lens. it just happens to be a very nice old manual focus 50mm, and those are cheap as dirt and good quality.but in general, one of the features of expensive lenses that photo-geeks shop around for is bokeh quality. people look for roundness, not having sharply defined edges of the highlights, and smoothness across the out of focus highlights.here's some examples of what causes problems or undesirable affects in bokeh: http://toothwalker.org/optics/bokeh.htmlthis one in particular should help illustrate part of the effect: compare with OP's orb: you can see a number of features in common: the mostly round shape (see the little flat part at about 5 o'clock? that's a stuck aperture blade), the brighter ring around the outside which kind of "glows", and the general splotchiness. i'll come back to that. frankly, any particulate would work. one of my images above is water, and the other actually is something like dust. in that last image, you have "orbs" at the top of the frame both in front and behind the plane of focus, with light refracting through the particulates.most of the pictures you find on the web are light reflecting off the particulates (usually from an on-camera flash), and between the subject and camera. so this gives them that semi-transparent effect, while being out of the DOF blurs them into circles. the "internal features" aren't an artifact of the dust; these are actually point sources of light in the image, with the shape of the "orb" entirely generated by the optics. the features are a product of the optics.in OP's case, it kind of looks like the coating on an element is separating. but note in the "onion" examples above that they have plenty of internal features. but these are still somewhat decent lenses, on decent cameras with big sensors. we're given nice high res images, or well defined bokeh, processed carefully.lets simulate a shitty camera. i took that same example image above, cut it down to 20% resolution, added noise, and jacked the resolution back up to simulate a smaller sensor. smaller sensors tend to have word noise performance, and less actual detail resolving ability (something something circle of confusion, ignore this but trust me on this). i ran some light noise reduction (despeckle) somehwere in the middle there, which camera manufacturers tend to do to mask the higher noise. do you see a face in the top left one? i do. and it looks happier than OP's.

Thanks. I had the impression that you were denying that orbs could be pictures of dust in your first post to this thread. It seemed that you were correcting those of us who held that position.I appreciate the detailed description. I wonder if it will have an affect on someone like irony man who cites youtube video titles as evidence and then calls others gullible when they disbelieve.