I Am Very Interested in Your Flash Photos of Falling Water Drops

While photographing falling water drops, I get at intermittent intervals some very astonishing pattern repetition anomalies that you can see here.  But such wonders occur on and off. What is interesting is that there is an anomaly that I get with 100% regularity. The anomaly is simply that each and every time that I take flash photos of falling water drops, I get a bunch of little circular shapes or orbs. Below is an example.  In this photo we see no repetition of motifs, no repeated pattern.  But we do see something that I cannot explain: the very appearance of all these circles. There is no obvious reason why such shapes should be appearing every time when falling water is photographed.

Even when such circles don't show any holes, notches, stripes, motifs or patterns, I can see significant details in them when I look closely. So it seems they can not be dismissed as mere "light bouncing off water" or "blooming" or something like that. Below is an example in which I can see such details (such as lots of tiny rings inside the top left circle). What we see below seems more like flat circles than spheres, so it does not seem plausible to explain such things as spheres of water.  Also, I know of no physics reason why isolated spheres of water would be constantly appearing inside falling streams of water.

Now, as I said, I get such circles 100% of the time when I take flash photos of falling water drops. I am curious about one thing: is such a regularity peculiar to me, or is it something that any photographer would get when taking flash photos of falling water drops? An exciting possibility is that there is some general tendency of water (a tendency for it to produce mysterious circles or orbs) that has been overlooked by our scientists, who are so very prone to turn a blind eye to anomalies they cannot explain.

To help answer this question, I would be very interested in getting flash photos of falling water drops from any photographer at all. I am just as interested in seeing such photographs when they seem to show nothing interesting as I am in seeing them if they show something a little interesting. For I am trying to find out in what percentage of the time such circles appear when various people take flash photos of falling water drops.

You can take such photographs of falling water drops using the simple technique I describe in this post (click on the title below to see the post):

A Simple Technique for Photographing Falling Water Drops

If anyone uses such a technique, please send me a link for the flash photos of falling water drops you published on social media, or just send me some of your flash photos of falling water drops in an attachment to an email you send to my email address of marjinsopmar@gmail.com.  If you take five or ten flash photos of falling water drops, it should be sufficient to help me answer this question of whether it is common for such circles or orbs to appear when different photographers take flash photos of falling water drops.

The Orb's Right-Angle Turn

Photo date: January 26, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

The photo below shows a mysterious speeding orb that I photographed indoors.  See here for dozens of similar photos.

Notched Orbs and Orb Veils

Photo date: January 28, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

I took the photos below while photographing only ordinary drops of pure, clean water falling in front of a black featureless background.  We see a bunch of orbs with notches along with some of the strange wispy things I call orb veils.

Why "You Can Get Anything by Magnifying" Fails as a Skeptical Rebuttal

I have recently heard the following objection to photos such as mine: the claim that "you can get anything you want in a photo by magnifying parts of it."  Below are several reasons why this fails as a skeptical rebuttal.

The first reason is that the statement simply isn't true. You might get many different things by magnifying little parts of a photo, but you can't get "anything you want." You could magnify parts of your random photos to your heart's content, and you would almost certainly never get, say, a part that would look like an image of Barack Obama or an image of a pink unicorn.

The second reason this rebuttal fails is that it only mentions a single occurrence of something, not massive repetitions of something. It might be true that if you magnify little parts of random photos, you might once in a blue moon get, say, something that looks like a purple car. But you would absolutely not get very many repetitions of such a thing. So a rebuttal that only explains one occurrence fails to rebut the many cases like I have in this blog of very many repetitions and pattern repetitions, as shown here and here.

The third reason this rebuttal fails is that I did not discover any of the 700+ mysterious striped orbs shown on this blog through any process of zooming in on photos and looking for something. In each case the striped orb was plainly visible in the photo before any zooming or cropping occurred. And I did not use any zoom lense when any of the photos was taken. I never "zoom in" looking for something in photos where I did not clearly see an anomaly in the photo without zooming in. Except when photographing falling water drops, my photographic magnification was always 1.0. In very many photos I have published such as the one below (from this post), it is evident that the orbs were a signficant fraction of the original photo, not just some tiny fraction got by zooming in.

The fourth reason this rebuttal fails is that 90% of my photos of mysterious striped orbs occurred when the orb was in front of a featureless plaster wall or a black cloudless sky.  You do not get appreciable details by zooming in on such things,  For example, here is a part of a photo showing a blank plaster wall, which is the most common background when I get a photo of a striped orb.

And here is part of a photo that showed a cloudless sky when I photographed a night orb.

It is not at all true that you can "get anything you want" by zooming in on such featureless areas of a photo. You won't get anything by zooming in on such areas.

The weakness of "you can get anything you want by magnifying" as a rebuttal is indicated by the following hypothetical exchange.

Astronomer: I think we're in for some trouble. On 30 days I have checked a particular spot in the sky with my telescope, and I keep seeing a big asteroid coming closer and closer toward our planet.
Skeptic: Just ignore it, because you can get anything you want by magnifying a view.

Tilt Your Head Left to See the "Face"

Photo date: January 27, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

Upon first taking the photo below, I failed to see anything resembling a face. But if you tilt you head way to the left, you can notice what looks rather like the head of a man wearing a dark T-shirt.

Mystifying Marks

Photo date: January 27, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

I took the photos below while photographing only ordinary drops of pure, clean water falling in front of a black featureless background.  We see orbs that each had an identical-looking pair of marks.

More Speeding Orbs

Below we see some speeding orbs I photographed in the past seven months.

Confounding Columns

Photo date: January 20, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

I took the photos below while photographing only ordinary drops of pure, clean water falling in front of a black featureless background.  We see a bunch of orbs that all have two holes or dark marks in a column.

Speeding Orbs

Below we see some speeding orbs I photographed in the past seven months.

I did not see any flying insects on any of the days these photos were taken. Here in New York City I see a flying insect indoors maybe an average of four days a year, but I get 120+ photos a year of speeding orbs, mostly indoors.  By now the number of speeding orbs I have photographed is well over 800, and probably more than 900. I have 743 posts labeled "speeding air orb," and quite a few of those show multiple speeding orbs. None of these speeding orbs look anything like flying insects (you can tell a flying insect from its protruding wings).  They can't be "speeding dust particles," because drifting indoor dust moves only at the speed at which indoor air circulates: only about 2 miles per hour.

Vivid Colors and a Pattern

hoto date: January 21, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

I took the photo below while photographing only ordinary drops of pure, clean water falling in front of a black featureless background. Although the colors differ, all of the orbs have the same mark at the bottom.

Confounding Color Gradients

Below we see various photos I took while photographing falling water drops. They show a variety of odd and colorful sights.

More Yellow Orbs

Below we see some mysterious yellow orbs that I photographed.

The 5000 Ovals, Part 2

Photo date: January 22, 2020. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

I took the photos below while photographing only ordinary drops of pure, clean water falling in front of a black featureless background.  On this day I got more than 1500 photos that each showed multiple orbs with a large oval hole inside them, always on the left or middle of the orb. Altogether I photographed on this day more than 5000 such orbs with these large oval holes.  Below are a few dozen examples.

This pattern appeared all of a sudden. Below we see consecutive photos. The photo on the right occurred just after the photo on the left.

At the 29:04 mark in the video below (and the next several minutes) you can see my camera viewfinder as I photographed exactly this pattern.