Discuss photo: strange light

if you can see this blown up you will notice that there is what appears to be a bird directly across from the light. the light almost has has a bird like shape. this was taken at the Toronto Zoo in Canada on February 18, 2011. taken with a Nikon D80 no flash!

Wow, what a great eye! Well, here's what I found when I worked with these a bit.

The one object you mentioned appears to be a leaf. A dead leaf at a that, notice the brown color.



It could also be a leaf moth (seen below) but I doubt it, I think its a real leaf, dead in nature.





The other object (The green glowing one)...



Well I went round and round about this one. When I did a luminance curve on it and brought out the detail it almost started to look like a green leaf. But that really doesn't fit, I doubt you would see a green leaf there. And the reason for its blurry appearance is because it was out of focus. The camera is focusing on the tree and so it has a fairly distant focal length. The green object is much more in the forefront so its blurry.

BUT when I examined the picture as a whole, I noticed that the upper right corner was very very bright. Almost glaring in appearance. I suspect the Sun or partially covered Sun was at that location. If that is the case, its much more likely that what you're seeing is a lens flare. It has all the classic characteristics of one.

Thank you, what exactly is a lens flare? I took about a hundred pictures this day, and this is the only one that had this. I will add the it was a very spiritual visit to the zoo.

Trackyd wrote:


A lens flare in simple terms is when the light from a very bright object is reflect, refracted or sometimes is split into its component frequencies within the complex lens structure of an optical device to produce an optical light effect.



The light first enters the front of the lens and most of it proceeds through the lenses to the back and the film or the digital optics. But if there is a source of bright light at just the right angle it can bounce back and forth, an split like a rainbow to produce multiple images of the bright light source. Normally these images appear much smaller than the original.

Here is one very dramatic example:



Notice the multiple images of the sun split into different colors. It only happens if the source of light is at just the right angle which is determined by the optics within your camera.

I'm not saying its definitely a lens flare. But there is a principal of science called Occam's razor which predicates that the simplest explanation is often the tenancy towards the more correct. If you have multiple photos from different angles which capture the same effect, then that would most certainly shift the tenancy towards some other explanation.

References:

Occam's Razor (wiki)

Lens Flares (wiki)