As If Some Mystical Wind Was Bending the Light Rays

Photo date: January 19, 2016. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

In this series of posts I have shown an incredibly strange photographic anomaly in which light seems to rise up like drifting smoke: the effect I call the light metamorphosis. On this day my photos again showed this phenomenon at Grand Central Terminal in New York.  The photos below were all taken while the camera was not moving, as you can tell from the fact that the people do not look streaked.

Another photo from the same day shows the light seeming to rise up in the opposite direction.

The exposure on both of these flash photos was only 1/30 of a second. The photos were taken by an old point-and-click Olympus camera, without using any special settings. Most photos taken with this camera show no such effect.