I caught a ghostie on (digital) film!
Or something. I don't have a rational explanation of what this is, but I sure thought it was interesting. I ran it by some very skeptical skeptics, and answered their questions about lighting, shadows, etc. and they couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation either.
Here's the backstory:
I got a new camera recently, an
Olympus Evolt E-300 digital SLR, and I have taken literally hundreds of shots with it in the past couple of months.
I took my new camera with me to dinner on Sunday afternoon at a restaurant in a canyon near my mother-in-law's house. After dinner
we took a short walk near the grounds and I found this interesting looking house that I wanted to get some arty type shots of.
So I have four shots, taken seconds apart, two with flash and two without. I have included the whole sequence so that you can see
the lighting and such, and in the final one there is this really bizarre black smoke / shadow / thing that I just can't explain.
These shots were taken from ground level looking upwards, and the door in question was raised up about 2-3 ft on a porch, which
I didn't go up on. The final shot, in which the anomaly appears, was shot with the flash, so any thing in between myself and the
camera, or any shadows being cast, would have been filled by the flash. I should mention that most of the canyon I was in was
completely in shadow, with only the very top of the opposite side being in the sun.
The sequence of shots went like this:
1. walk towards the door, pick an interesting angle, take first shot.
2. check preview, see overexposed stonework, turn off flash, take second shot
3. walk to the other side of the door, pick another angle, take a third picture
4. check preview, see it's a bit dark, needs flash, pop flash back up, take shot four
Then I went on to take some others before we left, and didn't see the anomaly until I was reviewing the pics later.
And before you ask, here are the questions I have already answered about the picture:
Q. Could this be your hand/finger/camera strap over the lens? Was your hand/finger/ camera strap over the flash?A. It's not at all possible that my finger or hand was over the flash or the lens. I was holding the lens with my left hand, underneath the bottom of the camera, adjusting the zoom, and pressing the shutter button with my right, which was not anywhere near the flash. If you've seen a photographer holding a pro type camera with the left hand cupping the lens from underneath, that is what I was doing. The zoom ring on the lens is near the back of the camera body, and the focus ring is toward the front. I was using the auto focus so my hand was near the camera body, not the lens. The strap was around my neck at the time. I don't have an explanation for why it is so dark, because I looked at the exif to make sure the flash had fired.
Q. Could this be your shadow or the shadow of a tree or something?A. If you are not familiar with our canyons, it may be hard to visualize why it would be impossible for this to be my shadow.
The first shot below illustrates how deep in the canyon we were, and how the bright light is only along the very tops of the
mountains. The second illustrates how flat the lighting was, as my son and my mother in law are not casting any discernible shadows. These two shots were taken literally in front of this house that I photographed, across the street, during the same three or four minutes or so.
The diagram below is a crude depiction of the arrangement of the landscape I was in. We were several miles deep into the canyon, with
some very tall mountains between us and the sun. It was past 6:30, and the sun was well on it's way down to the horizon.
For this to be my shadow, the sun would have had to be in the canyon with us, and below me, since I was shooting upward. The blue lines on the diagram indicate roughly the camera angle, with the approximate location of my head.
If it were a tree or other object, the shadow would have been clearly visible in the previous shots.
Exif data on the ghostie picture are as follows: 1/125, f6.3, ISO 100, Flash fired, auto mode, metering Pattern (Olympus ESP), WB Custom 6500K, Program normal.
Another thing about this shot is that I shoot exclusively in RAW format, so there is no processing or conversion at all done in camera. If anyone would like to see the original RAW file, you'll need to be able to open the Olympus format ORF and a large capacity email account, the file size is 13.5 Mb. The only conversion done to these shots was to reduce the size to web format, then saved as medium-high quality jpgs.
I don't really know what the shadow could be. There was nothing in between me and the door, the house was deserted, or at least appeared
to be. I've had real, unexplainable paranormal events happen in my presence, so I don't discount that it could be a spirit or entity of
some kind. It is very interesting, to say the least!
Perhaps the keeper of the house saw me near the front door and decided to come investigate! LOL. At the time, I did not really sense
anything, and I was near the house for about a total of two minutes, if that. I know that I was sort of drawn to the door to photograph it, which is a bit unusual as I usually do more natural type shots of flowers, plants, trees etc. and don't do much architectural photography.
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