Orbs in photos
Orbs in photos are almost always specks of dust, pollen or moisture lit by a flash right beside the lens. A camp director in California, recorded by a folklore archive, called them spirits from the past.
What it may mean
Nobody sees an orb when the shutter clicks. The room looks clear, the flash fires, and only later, flicking through the shots, does a pale circle turn up beside someone's shoulder. To a photographer it is backscatter, a speck of dust or a drop of mist a few inches from the lens; to the camp director in one California story, it was a spirit keeping watch. Either way, the camera recorded something that hung in the air the whole time and that nobody in the room registered. Many events work on the same delay. A dinner, a job interview, an argument in the car: the detail that matters often surfaces days later, when you go back over the scene with nothing else to do. An orb is the camera's version of that afterthought.
Depending on how you saw it
A green or orange orb
Orbs come in colors, and people often search for green or orange ones in particular. The tint comes from the speck itself (a grain of pollen or a sliver of insect wing) or from the way the lens handles light at the edge of a blur. Which detail of a recent event have you colored in afterward with your own explanation?
Orbs that move between shots
Take three photos in a row and the circles land in new places in each frame, which the California storyteller read as spirits moving about. Drifting dust in a flashlight beam does the same. What around you seems restless mainly because you keep checking on it?
An orb beside one person
When a circle hovers near one face in a group shot, viewers often read it as company for that person. In a crowded frame it simply landed where the flash hit hardest. Whose face do you search for first in any group photo, and why theirs?
Orbs around a campfire or in the rain
Smoke, ash, drizzle and falling snow fill the air with exactly what a flash lights best, so night shots outdoors are crowded with orbs. The darkest settings make the busiest frames. Which place in your life always seems to produce strange stories, and what is actually floating in the air there?
Why it happens in nature
Orbs are a flash effect known as backscatter. Dust, pollen, water droplets or tiny insects floating close to the lens are too near to be in focus, and the flash, fired from just beside the lens, lights them up as soft round discs. Phones and compact cameras, with the flash right next to the lens, produce them most often, especially in dusty rooms, mist, rain or snow.
What folk beliefs say
United States (California)
A camp director in Mill Valley, California, recorded in 2008, told her staff that orbs in photos are spirits from the past, neither good nor evil, and that some people have guiding spirits that often appear near them in pictures.
Source: Sarah Brayton (collector), Folk Belief (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2010), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
To reflect on
Which recent event made more sense to you only when you went back over it later?