Chariots of God (Scripture & Photo Examined)

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.

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.

ah, wasn't my intention. the only bit i really wanted to correct was the "clean your lens" comments.in any case, it doesn't even necessarily have to be anything at all, just a point light source. it's just that to get a point light source floating in front of a subject, you generally have to have light refracting through or reflecting off some particulate (rather than the light source being a point because it's far away). water works well, as does dust, and i'm sure there's a few other ways to do it.

403 forbidden.most sites don't like hotlinking. it steals bandwidth. use an image sharing site. i suggest imgur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl9vIvtiWrI

looks more like jace the mind sculptor to me: which would make sense. he's one of the most powerful planeswalkers in magic: the gathering.

Pareidolia - Wikipedia

your site doesn't like hotlinking. we can't see anything except a broken thumbnail. post to image sharing site so we can see.

no, i mean, this is what your message looks like: we literally can't see what you're talking about. like it doesn't show up in our web browsers.

seriously, there are sharp details in the closeup that are finer than the compression allows for. the second face is layered on in photoshop.

progress! i dunno, still kinda looks like jace the mind sculptor and a barrel-eyed fish to me.the thing is, we're looking and blurs and smudges. you're seeing what you want to see in them. i'll admit that it does look like the streak has a face, but that's because i'm also susceptible to pareidolia. the face on mars: really looks like a face in the tiny, blurry, smudgy version. but it looks a bit less so when you can see it clearly: and it looks even less so in 3d, or when the light hits it from a different angle: Unmasking the Face on Mars | Science Mission Directoratewhat we're actually looking at is the human desire to look for other faces and read emotions and identities from them. i mean, it's reason we all see faces in happy chairs

you are failing to understand that i'm really quite familiar with photography in general, and i don't see anything especially unusual here. like, do they talk to you? have you every considered that you might actually be suffering from some kind of psychiatric break with reality? i'm quite concerned. well, no, it definitely is pareidolia. you're seeing faces in blurs and smudges and out-of-focus dust specks, and streaks caused by slower shutter speeds. that's what pareidolia is.my point here is that they look like other stuff to me. and i think if we polled the board here, and asked whether your blurs and smudges and looked like your arts from the middle ages, or my fish and magic card, i suspect most people would side with me. while poe's law is a thing, i have no doubt that you are sincere. but you're also seeing what you want to see, and interpreting it how you want to interpret it.

seriously, it really looks like a fish.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zVv7uB2ElY

because i'm not convinced by your pictures? let's look at some spirit photographs from the past, shall we? this is a series of photographs made starting in 1917, in cottingley england. they had people of the era convinced, including sir arthur conan doyle, author of the sherlock holmes novels. are you convinced by these photographs? why or why not?