Eidolon Paranormal Australia: Insects and Photography

Saturday 28 July 2012

Insects and Photography

written for The S.A. Paranormal Meet-ups 28/7/12

Insects are often flying and crawling about in many locations paranormal investigators visit, whether it be cemeteries, abandoned buildings, or even private homes, hotels and mansions, it doesn't matter where you go, the likelihood of a flying insect being present is high.

Most investigators don't even factor in their presence, being more interested in getting EMF readings and other measurements before starting their vigils and EVP sessions.

At Eidolon Paranormal, we take into consideration the fact that many flying insects may be present at a location and we try to identify them, and if possible take photos of them in action for later comparison, as this is not always possible we have invested in some bug catchers from Toy's-R-Us.

We place bug catcher in the location to collect a sample of insects, which we can then identify at a later time, making it possible to compare and disregard many photography anomalies based upon the structure of the insect in comparison to orbs and other phenomena in our photos and videos.

There are ways to attract the insects towards your camera for photos, a black light, or insect bug zapper placed underneath the front of your camera tripod will attract certain bugs and moths, allowing you to take the photos you need for later comparison, or you can use our own method from above

What you will notice in your photos is that the “orbs” created from insects are usually of an irregular shape, the further from the camera, the “rounder” they will appear.

If the insect is close to your flash it will usually reflect back to the lens causing a glowing effect around the insect, but the body of the insect or its wings will usually have shape and definition, but appear glowing and distorted when compared to an insect photo taken without the flash.

Some insects will appear very small and will look like a solid object inside a glowing orb of colour, after trialling the experiments above, you will soon see how to distinguish different types of smaller insect orbs.

Another common orb is a white orb with a brown “face” like appearance within the orb, in Australia these can often be attributed to Mosquitoes, the smaller body of the mozzie creates less “feedback glow” from the flash but still makes an orb shape, and it's legs often create the illusion, combined with the torso, of a “face" within the orb itself.

For more on Pareidolia please visit our website here: Eidolon Paranormal

Many amateur ghost teams and spiritualists post photos of insects online claiming they are “Angels” or “fairies” when quite clearly they are insects, in some of the ones we have come across, even right here in Australia, they are clearly insects, such as moths and gnats.

Eidolon Paranormal is currently undertaking a survey in a local haunted “hotspot” where we are collecting insects at different times of the day/night and in different seasons, to establish the types of flying insects in the area. We are hoping to create an online database for our website, so people that visit the hotspot with little photography knowledge, thinking they have caught something paranormal, can then compare their photo's to our database and debunk their own paranormal photography themselves.