The Common Misconception Of ORBS

One of the more common emails and letters I receive has to do with photographs of anomalous shapes and lights on film and digital media. People want (sometimes demand) that I and my colleagues review photos and explain what the images are – naturally they want us to identify the images as “ghosts.” In almost all such cases, people present did not see, hear or otherwise experience anything paranormal – which means they did not know the photo had anything “unusual” on it until later. In many of the cases, they were not even in a location with any current (or even past) witnesses saying the place was haunted.

One of the most common photos are the hundreds of orbs floating around in a cemetery. First off here is a personal opinion, cemeteries are not haunted. Think about it, if we are dealing with some form of intelligent consciousness or a “ghost” it would go around something it could familiarize itself with. [http://sherriwalsh.devhub.com/blog/2302532-star-paranormal-investigators-of-kentucky/ video of orbs] Now many people may say well there body is there, isn’t that something familiar? But to make sense of this comment a statement Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach made makes perfect sense if you think about it, and that was “If ghosts haunt cemeteries because there body is there, what about organ donors?”

Well people started to see these anomalies in the digital photographs that they were taking and started to make the connection and concluded that these must indeed be ghosts. This is seriously how the craze started. Before the digital camera era orb photos were actually very rare, so it seems to be more of a digital camera phenomena which would be why most orb photographers use digital rather then film. Now just because orbs have been caught on film doesn’t make it paranormal. Light sources or the size of the camera lens or the camera itself plays a huge factor in results.

A crucial question is - why did orbs suddenly appear when digital cameras arrived? The sensor chips in digital cameras are almost all physically smaller than the size of a 35mm film frame (most are less than half the size). This meant that wider-angle lenses were needed for digital cameras so they could show the same area of view in a frame as a 35mm film cameras (otherwise digital cameras would have shown a much smaller area of view). These wider-angled lenses had a much greater depth of field. Depth of field is the area in front of a camera where objects are in focus.

For many of them, the orb photos could constitute the bulk of their evidence and they are simply unwilling to erase the majority of what has made them who they see themselves as. This is similar to teams that have the words Ghost Hunters in their name. Most claim to be too well established under that name. When I first started I called myself Portland Paranormal Investigations. I had a domain name, email address and a lot of other things tied to that name. Once I decided to change it to Portland Ghosts I just did it. In hindsight it wasn’t a big deal and happened very quickly.

This also helps to prove that digital cameras can photograph airborne particles that exist in nature that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Also digital cameras can (when the particle is close enough) capture patterns within the particle. This can realistically explain why orbs don’t appear to ever be hidden behind objects except other orbs. It is because the particles are so close to the camera that there cannot be any object between the particles and the camera. It also explains to why photographers do not see particles when taking photos; it is because they are too small for the human eye to see.