By: +David Herron; Date: Mon Jan 04 2021 13:13:44 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
There's a growing phenomenon of Orb Photography, and many are claiming these pictures are indicating the presence of spirits. What are they?
There is a controversy surrounding these pictures. Some point to well known optical effects like lens flares. But others say they've carefully studied the optical system, and have examples of photographs that are clearly not optical issues, and know some simple methods to recreate those photographs at any time.
Many claim the photographs point to the existence of the spiritual world. In our society the scientific method has proven itself very valuable, and the scientific method demands hard evidence preferably through mechanical measurements. The spirit world has defied such measurements. I myself are looking for ways to better understand the spiritual practices and the world of spirit. It seems clear that any spiritual emanation which causes a physical effect must use the mechanisms of the world. For example, when a healer helps someone heal, the healing response and healing effects must be working through some as-yet-unknown behavior of the universe.
In 1995 I took a trip to Machu Picchu and had a wonderful four days exploring every nook and cranny of that city high in the Andes. I took many pictures and was astonished on returning home that some of the pictures had extra 'stuff' in them, and that the 'stuff' happened to be similar to a mural that's painted on the hotel next to the Machu Picchu Citadel.
While those pictures were interesting to me, I didn't take as much notice of them as I might until I met Klaus Heinemann a few years ago. He is a physicist who happens to be studying spiritual healing techniques. It was at a Ron Roth seminar where I met Klaus, and witnessed him taking the pictures which are the source for the orb photography he has been doing. At some events Klaus was doing more than simply taking pictures as one might do for documentary purposes. Instead he would have two cameras (or more) at a time and doing the best he could to take pictures at the same time with each camera. He was clearly using the cameras more carefully than the typical picture-taking one would do at an event led by your spiritual teacher.
At the same time we should be clear about something - There are clearly ways with a camera to have light bouncing around inside the camera and make some extra stuff show up in the picture that are not physical objects. For example someone could hold a flashlight and, with a time exposure, use the flashlight to draw pictures. Or a bright light source (like the sun) shot at certain angles can cause light to bounce around inside the lens and make lens flares show up in the picture. This is so common an effect that photographers have a name for it, lens flares. There are also filters which do effects like make star burst patterns at any bright light source. And dust or mist in the air can affect a picture.
The claim is that orb photo's can be distinguished from all those other effects.