English DT journalist Andy Boxall used his camera. Xiaomi 14 Ultra, when he took a photo that left him wondering: was it a photo of a ghost? Here’s his story.
I take thousands of photographs every year, but to my knowledge I have never photographed a ghost before. That is, until now. Without realizing it, I had captured a series of eerie images while taking photos with my new cell phone, and they showed something so eerie, so supernatural, so frightening that I could not believe my eyes.
But what was Is this really an anomaly? I wanted answers and knew the truth was out there.
How I captured it
He didn’t intentionally hunt ghosts. I took photos while testing Xiaomi 14 Ultra and his photo kit. It was midday on a cool March day, and the misty sun was trying to break through the morning wind and rain. The local church always makes a great backdrop for my sightseeing photos, so I headed there. While walking through the cemetery, I took three specific photos for comparison: one without a filter, one with a polarizing filter, and one with a UV filter.
In total, during the hike, I took about 50 photos in a few hours and did not look at them closely until I transferred them to my computer a few days later. I was looking through them to find ones that would fit my article, and I saw something strange when I got to the photos of the church. What was What? A ball of bright, shining light hovered over one of the tombstones; He was present in all three photographs and, horrifyingly, seemed to be constantly moving towards the gravestone.
My interest was immediately piqued. Balls of light, captured on film or photographs, have been a mainstay of (albeit controversial) paranormal research and evidence for many years, and anyone who has seen even one episode Ghost Adventures or your type will be familiar with this concept. I sent them to a friend of mine who is a fan of these types of shows and his response was simply, “This is really creepy.”
I’m putting on my skeptic hat again.
The photos were undoubtedly creepy, but what did they really show? I put my Zak Bagan wannabe hat aside and put my skeptical journalist hat back on to think logically about the images. I used different filters in two of the photos and no filters in the other, so dust being trapped on the lens seemed an unlikely explanation. It was during the day, so the appearance of some insect reflecting the light was also not possible. It also seemed that the ball was far away from the lens and the distance also remained constant.
The angle of my camera changed slightly after changing filters and repositioning, but this would certainly have affected any lens flare later on. I didn’t use burst mode and there was a pause between each photo while I played with filters that I thought would combine to minimize any such effects. Also, the sphere remains the same size and color, but wouldn’t changing the filter and my position change it at least a little?
By this point, he had apparently exhausted all logical explanations, leaving paranormal activity as the only remaining explanation. He caught a wandering spirit in the cemetery near the church (which exactly where you expect to find it) throughout the day on your smartphone. It was an incredible moment and I was at a turning point. Should I first call the tabloids, the church itself to see if it’s an established phenomenon (hopefully with a cool name like “green lady” or “gravedigger”), or a paranormal photography expert to confirm my amazingness opening?
Trying to discredit my photo
I decided the best course of action was secret option number four: try to discredit my photo. I contacted Kenny Biddle, chief investigator of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, sent him the original photographs and explained that my process definitely meant it couldn’t be something as trivial as lens flare. I was looking forward to the video call where he would tell me that these images were some of the most disconcerting images he had ever seen.
“Probably about 20 to 25 years,” Biddle told me when I asked him how long he’s been investigating the paranormal. We chatted via Google Meet and he sat in an office filled with books and his collection of over 300 cameras, which I could only glimpse. His background in photography has helped him recreate many famous images of ghosts, UFOs and even Bigfoot, often using the same equipment that took the original image. But why do this?
“It’s so fun to see not only the different photos and videos people receive, but also their beliefs and thought process,” Biddle smiled. “Like, how did they come to the conclusion that this is something unnatural? “It fascinates me.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Biddle described himself as “like Velma from Scooby Doo, the brains of Mystery Incorporated. “I would really like to find the ghost that I couldn’t explain.” It’s a great quote, but it doesn’t bode well for my images, so am I the only one who found them weird?
“When people see a photo or video like this, there’s a side that says, ‘Yes, that’s absolutely true.’ And then the other side says, ‘No, that’s a lie,'” he continued. “For me, most of the experiences I have been in are usually misinterpretations. People worry, they feel like something strange is happening to them and they can’t explain it. This is normal because generally the general public has limited knowledge of photography, video effects and editing.
Marsh gas? No, sorry, it’s a glare
We soon started talking about my photographs of ghostly orbs.
“I look at the photos you sent me and I understand; It’s something weird that maybe a ghost hunter would say, “Hey, what’s that?” What kind of light is this? But there are some commonalities in these three images,” Biddle explained. “First, you take a photo in the sun and you name it. This is lens flare. That’s exactly what it is. The other common denominator is that you have glare, meaning you have the sun and its visible light. Even if you use two different filters, you still get the same visible light.
Oh. I better abandon my plans to build my own proton pack and prepare for a return visit to the cemetery. It probably took Biddle some time to understand what was happening in the photographs.
“All I did was lower the brightness and contrast so I could see exactly where the sun was because that eliminated the glare,” he said. “I could draw a line from the sun to the highlights in the photograph. I tell people a little trick: try it, improve it, draw the line. If it passes through the center of the photo, this is confirmation that it is a lens flare.
“I get such bright light photos that some people don’t even know what they are,” he told me, before adding, “But yeah, they’re pretty good.”
He didn’t believe in ghosts. Or rather, until today I haven’t done this
Did I really think I had photographed the spirit that manifested itself in the form of a glowing orb that day in the cemetery? It’s time to come clean, because no, I didn’t do it. But they made me stop and watch, sent them to my friends and enjoyed the feeling of accidentally capturing something so creepy. These are exactly the kind of photos that can be considered inexplicable, which Biddle also confirmed, especially after I cropped them to focus on the ball, which, let’s face it, you would do too.
Why did I tell this story? Because it perfectly captures everything I love about photography. Is fun, I will forever remember this set of images, and isn’t that what we all hope to get from our photographs, especially ones as unexpected as this one? I’m sure we’ve all taken a random photo and captured something special. It could be your child doing something fun, an animal doing something cute, or a classic surprise photobomb. Or a ghost.
That’s what my sphere photography is for me. Surprising and fun, with the right look and in the right place to be memorable, creepy and perhaps inexplicable. I’ll add it to my repertoire of personal ghost stories and leave aside Biddle’s disappointing and entirely logical explanation for its full effect. Besides, I’ll go back to photographing the church as usual, not expecting a ghost to appear now that my balloon is debunked. That is… if you choose believe really in the explanation. *Insert screaming face emoji here.*
Source: Digital Trends
