Since the creation of digital cameras there has been a very heated debate going on among ghost investigators as to what malfunctions they may have. The debate seems to be over false positives, the digital camera (well of the past) we far inferior to the good ole 35mm film cameras. They had some difficulty in low light settings that caused something called pixilation error. The images these digital cameras produced had white spots in them which led many to believe they had captured spirit energy. This led to a huge increase in the amount of digital cameras investigators used and the amount of images being posted on the internet also saw a large influx. Hundreds and hundreds of people posted nothing but orb pictures on their websites. It turns out these were not orbs at all but really just this pixilation error, there are slight things you can look for to determine if your images are or are not spirit related.

The things that you should look for to start to determine if your images are “real” or not are as follows. Kodak states that if your camera is having pixilation error the “orbs” are not transparent, meaning you cannot see images behind them such as walls or tables. The orb is not see through; it is always white and more blotchy or not as spherical or defined as a true spirit orb. If the camera is struggling to fill an area in with colors and it cannot determine what to fill that area in with it will just leave it blank resulting in a white “shape” in your image.

There is one great way to tell if your image is the result of a ghost or not. Did you capture this image as the result of getting some other kind of evidence? Meaning did you notice an EMF spike on your detector to trigger the snap of the camera? Did you get a temperature drop or any other form of evidence associated to spirit phenomena? As investigators we can no longer only rely on one or two faint dissimilar pieces of evidence. We must only provide the best of the best for people to view and pick apart. If you give a skeptic just a crummy old orb picture with no other supporting evidence they will tear you apart. Now if you tell a skeptic that you caught this picture with “Ecto” (which you will hear my beef about in another issue of G.H.O.S.H.) because at the time you took the shot you were getting a 5.5 milligaus spike on your EMF detector as well as a temperature drop and also recorded an EVP at the same time they are going to have a harder time picking at your evidence.

Now for the good old 35mm camera and old film cameras of yesterday, these are still great devices. You should always have a film camera in your arsenal; the reason being is that you will have a negative to keep on file that can be checked to see if it was tampered with. The other reason is that it is another eye for you to use, it has been around for a very long time so people are used to it, and people tend to question it less.

These should be used in unison, together film and digital living in peace working together in harmony. That way maybe you can catch the same things on both devices. We know the benefits of using digital equipment, trust us. It is very nice not having such high development costs. Back in the day of all digital we used to have two or three hundred shots to develop some times, and at 7 bucks a roll that can be very pricey. Another great reason for a digital is that you can instantly see the results of your shots which is great when on an investigation. And go through virtually unlimited shots depending on the size of your memory card.

Now whether digital is better than film we cannot say that is up to the investigator, we can not say what people are going to prefer. There are many die hards out there who don’t use digitals and wont. One of the downfalls of this whole digi vs. film issue is that with the flood of digital pictures of false positive images plaguing the web people are now believing that orbs are not spiritual, but rather just dust, water, pollen and more that people have captured.

A lot of these are also easily identified as being earthly as opposed to ghosts. Bugs you can usually clearly see, it is almost beautiful to capture these winged creatures in mid flight but we cannot post them on the internet as spirit energy. Water, Pollen and Dust usually are milky white and not as spherical as true orbs are. Also they are not colored; we have seen orbs in many different colors yellow, red, and blue. A lot of investigators claim that these colors show the emotions of the spirits almost the same as the photographs they take of auras in psychic readings. We are not going to sit here and claim that this is the truth as we still need a lot more information before we make a judgment on that claim.