Face in pant leg Santa Claus?

  Julie, of Julie's World has seen something odd in a photograph she took, and asked for opinions:

in the kitchen doorway to the left is what appears to be [ecto-plasm], which is creepy and ghostly enough...but if you look closely in my husbands pant leg behind that you can see a creepy fricken face...take a look and see what you all think. Do you think it is the real thing or my imagination?

I will tell you my opinion. Be aware of some facts first.

One: I am skeptical that things like ghosts exist. I have never seen any evidence for them that I consider compelling.

Two: I have a significant amount of experience with cameras and photography. I worked in the photographic industry for several years.

Re: The "ecto-thingy" - While it looks like it is behind her, nowhere does she actually occlude it, so that conclusion is unsupported. Translating a three dimensional scene to a two dimensional image sometimes screws up our perspective, and makes it hard to say exactly where things like that are.
   There is one thing to understand about the way a camera works. Not everything in a scene is sharply focussed in any picture.  The camera lens has a specific "depth of field" of focus that changes depending on the type of camera, the size of the aperture (or lens opening), and the point of sharpest focus. For a general scene like the one in your picture, things from about three feet away from the camera to about 15 feet away from the camera will probably appear sharply focussed. Things closer and farther away will be fuzzy to some degree. Things very close to the camera will appear very fuzzy, often even diaphanous.
   Here's a fun experiment. Make a two thumbs up sign with your hands held at arm's length. Close one eye. Look at your thumbs, and slowly bring one thumb closer to your eye, as the other stays at arm's length. Keep your eye focussed on the far away thumb. As your other thumb gets very close to your eye, you will see that it gets very fuzzy, and almost looks like it has a halo around it. That is because your eye cannot focus on both things at once. It almost seems like you are looking through the edge of your thumb.
   Sometimes the same thing happens in a picture. Something really close to the camera sticks a little bit in front of the lens. In the picture, it appears very indistinct. You can almost see through it, like you would expect a ghost to be. Also, because it was very close to the camera when the flash went off, the object appears white. It has been illuminated very strongly by the white camera flash.
   What was the object? Could have been many things. The camera's wrist strap is a common culprit. A finger or thumb also has been known wander. A bit of sleeve from a sweater. A little bit of cigarette smoke, maybe. Here is an example of a similar image I took tonight.

   Pixie appears to be examining a ghostly apparition hovering just in front of her. In actuality, she was not looking anywhere near it. She was about twelve feet away from me when I took the picture, and the corner of a cushion (for that is what that white blob is) is mere inches in front of the lens. These kinds of photographic anomolies are very common.
   But wait, I hear you say. I didn't see whatever-it-was through the lens when I took the picture. Well, that's because you aren't actually looking through the lens when you take a picture. Your camera has something called a viewfinder that you look through that is separate from the camera lens. In your case, I would guess that your viewfinder is to the right hand side, as you look at the back of your camera. That is how something could stick very slightly in front of the left side of the lens without you seeing it.
   An important thing to remember in all this is that our eyes are much more sensitive than a camera. If you didn't see anything in the room, the camera certainly isn't going to pick it up. I think you can rest assured that the photograph you have displayed there does not show a ghost.

Re: The face in the pant leg - Well, you've got a couple of things going on there. First, that part of the picture is less sharply focussed than the rest, primarily because it is farther away. Second, a little wisp of whatever that white stuff is, is sticking up in front of the pant leg, partially obscuring it. Third, there are some digital artefacts in the picture. All these things serve to make the actual details of the picture somewhat indistinct.
   Thereis a very well known psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia. Basically, it is a human being's tendency to look for recognisable patterns in random things. A common example is seeing shapes in clouds. Along with that, people's brains are especially attuned to the shape of the human face. It is, perhaps, the first image we ever see. Some psychologists have suggested that our brains have been hard wired to look for it by a million years of natural selection. The result is silly things like the 'face on Mars' brouhaha we had a couple of years ago.
   Consider these squiggles I doodled this evening.



Look like anything? No? What if I turn them upside down?



   Now they are a face. Two dots above, one in the middle, and a somewhat horizontal line. A human face can be represented by less information than any other concept because we are predisposed to see it. So the random bits of imagery that seem to form a face in your husband's pant leg? Relax, they're just random bits of imagery.

   A funny story... On a web forum I frequent, a person posted a photograph of a row of about twenty trees. The person claimed that there was the clear image of a face to be seen in the photo. Several people posted to say that they did not see any face, but several others did, and pointed to three or four different places in the picture where it appeared. None of those places were where the original poster thought she had seen a face. Moral of the story? The Madonna is in the grilled cheese of the beholder. Or something like that.

   For more examples of photographs that do not have any ghosts in them, read my earlier entry on spirit photography. A caution. It contains satire. Be assured that I have never advocated the eating of babies. Or baby back ribs.

tags:Skepticism,