Dec 2012: I've been absent from PBase for a number of months (and won't really be catching up until the Christmas break) and my first photo back was originally going to be a PAD shot explaining my absence and what had happened in the intervening time. However that will have to wait since there is far too much demand from a number of people to see this shot.

While at Port Arthur we went on a ghost tour as sunset fell. The guide advised us to check our photos carefully, even the ones that we had taken during the day since there were occasionally strange apparitions in them. "Uh-huh, yeah, OK", I thought. Three days later we arrive home and I download the shots into Bridge and start doing the usual tagging and sorting and filtering and… what the h3ll is THAT?

First thought was of course some kind of motion blur. However first there wasn't any wind at that time, second, yes, you can see a couple of pieces of paper on the ground on the left but they're both still there and unmoved in the next shot taken 10 seconds later (which I dropped the exposure by 1/3rd of a stop on since I realised that I'd blown out the background too much), third, even if it was motion blur from a piece of paper given the distance and exposure speed that thing would have to have been bookin' it at around 80km/h by my calculations and fourth, the eye is drawn to motion and I didn't see any sodding thing there at the time. Oh, and fifth, it appears to have some kind of depth; less apparent in the (necessarily reduced-size) image that I've uploaded, but very apparent in the 2592*3888 RAW image coming into PhotoShop. To maintain fidelity I've done nothing to the image aside from:
- Adding the signature layer; no adjustment layers were used;
- Converting the original Adobe RGB profile to sRGB so that it'll display properly on most browsers and;
Shrinking it down to an appropriate web size, though I do encourage you to select the Original size link so that you can see the whole thing.

None of the exposures before or after had any form of smear on the camera lens (and you'd certainly expect it in the one taken 10 seconds later if that was indeed the cause) and in 25,631 images up to that time the 40D has never given anything even remotely like this. Lens flare, sure, but this doesn't look like any lens flare that I've seen.

So what is it? Up to you to decide whether you want to be Mulder or Scully today, and to decide "who you gonna call"?

(By popular request I've added an un-reduced copy of the shot, cropped to the area around the... whatever it is. It is the next image in the gallery.)