An Unfathomable Transformation of the Light

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

In this series of 8 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.  The first one shows a spectacular curved ascent of light in the station. You can see the photo in higher resolution by opening it in a separate browser tab.

You can tell the camera was not moving from the fact that only the light looks streaked, not the windows, and not the people shown in the photo.  The EXIF data on the file shows the exposure time was only 1/30 of a second.

This strange effect did not occur in the first twenty or so photos I took with this camera at this place. Below is one of these photos, which shows Grand Central with its normal appearance.

But then the strange "light metamorphosis" effect kicked in, and I started getting many pictures like the first picture shown above. Below is another of these photos showing an inexplicable transformation of the light. Below we see all of the light in the station seems to move in a curved manner, making two different changes in directions.  An orb is visible near the top, underneath one of the strange curved light streams.

The EXIF data on the file shows the exposure time was only 1/30 of a second. On this night I got more than 20 photos like this, all while my camera was held quite stable. I will publish some more of these photos in the near future. These photos were all flash photos, using normal camera settings.

Note the incredible effect above the circular information desk at the center of the station. It looks as if some huge bonfire was lit on top of the desk. But there was no such fire.

The photos shown here were all uploaded directly from the camera without any type of modification.  They were taken by an old Olympus point-and-click camera, using normal settings.