A good photographer I know took this picture at a yearly advent celebration in his home town in Iceland. The local kids form a “peace-chain” and light the cross situated above their town.
This year he got this upside down cross floating in the sky. I can think of only three causes for this:
The bright light is reflecting off the mirror back onto the sensor - but that doesn’t feel quite right because I think the mirror wouldn’t be orientated like that and the reflection is off to one side slightly.
It’s caused by an element inside the lens - although I’m not sure how. I know optics generally deliver an upside down image so it could be something like this.
Beelzebub himself has chosen to retake the Earth and has started in Iceland. This may explain all the volcanoes.
Camera settings: Canon 5d with 24-105mm (@35 mm), tripod mounted and the settings were f/7.1, 10 second exposure, ISO 200
Any chance of a better resolution version? Best of all the original, unprocessed, image. The one we get to see has so little information left in it, and is so filled with compression artefacts, it is hard to see what the cause might be. Failing that, 3 is the best guess.
Can’t be 1 - the mirror flips totally out of the way.
2 is unlikely - there are no other similar artefacts from any other light sources in the frame. The geometry is not consistent with the theory either.
Can we assume the camera was outdoors and there was nothing between the camera and the subject?
Images do indeed reflect off of various elements inside the lens assembly. The classic case is a reflected image of the sun that gets modified by the camera’s iris. In the present case, the brightest object in your image isn’t a round shape (like the sun), it’s that crucifix, and that’s why the reflected image is also a crucifix.
Flare may or may not be visible depending on the angle a given bright object takes with respect to the camera’s optical axis; this could explain why only the crucifix presents a flare image. For a similar example, see the “Dome of the Rotunda” picture at the bottom of the Wikipedia page.
Multiple reflection inside one of the camera lenses would be my guess. That cross must be much brighter than any of the other lights, since none of them easily show that effect. Was that picture cropped, with the point midway between the centers of the two crosses at scene center? I think the closest light to the lower left also has an image through that point. It’s pretty faint.
Yeah, I think between them Machine Elf and ZenBeam have it. The cross must have been seriously bright, it is totally saturated in the image, and there is some clue that most of the cross in the image is actually bleed of the light, and the actual light source was just a thin line. This although the other lights look bright, and are also saturated, they are actually much less bright than the cross. If the image has been cropped it could account for the odd geometry of the reflection.
This is acommon effect when you have a bright light. You get a double reflection from the front and back surfaces of the camera lens itself that gives you an upside-down image of the bright object. The center of the generally corresponds with the midpoint between the original bright image and its reflection.
This phenomenon has been the cause of many UFO images,. There’s a famous one of UFOs over the US Capitol dome. If you examine the photo carefully, each of the UFOs “over” the Capitol is clearly a reflection of one of the streetlights below (look at the “July 1952” pictures in this link, for instance:
Thanks all. So lens flare it is by the looks. Is all lens flare upside down or is it just dependent on the lens? EDIT: CalMeacham explains it fairly well.
The photographer tells me it was cropped and on the original RAW file you can count the light bulbs on the reflected cross.
It’s 2. This is parallel to a number of famous UFO photos, where a “squadron of UFOs” in the sky can be matched to a pattern of bright points in the image.
Also, a cheap lens filter that is not multicoated or has a little chip in it will cause these kinds of reflections. I had it happen to me all the time with candles, until I realized that by removing the filter, I eliminated the reflection.
They can also be caused by internal lens elements, of course, but check with your friend and see if he was using a filter on the lens. If so, if he wants to minimize that problem in the future, he should consider taking the filter off.
I was going to suggest a fata morgana mirage, which is an atmospheric refraction effect that can indeed give rise to an inverted (or non-inverted) image of a distant object apparently floating in the sky above the original object. However, in that case, it should have been visible to the spectators present as well as in the photograph, and I think the fata morgana always appears directly over the original object.
Well, not quite. A starburst filter flares the actual points of light in an image so instead of appearing as round points they appear as, well, starbursts. This is quite a different effect, but I agree it is likely caused by stray light reflecting in a filter, although judging by beowulff’s link above, it could just as well be the lens iteslf.
