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The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/Sarkastik_Criminal on 2024-12-22 20:08:34+00:00.

Let me start by saying that I’m fairly new to this community and have mostly only lurked on reddit for a number of years. I’ve been seeing some misinformation about cameras and lenses though that’s really been bothering me so here is my rant.

I have a degree in film and have worked for ad agencies making marketing videos and doing regular photography and video work for the past 8 years. I’d like to talk a little bit about how focus works in regards to your typical “professional dslr/mirrorless” camera and an “iPhone” camera. They don’t work the same way. One is the result of a big lens and is analogue in nature, and the other creates a false depth of field or “blurry background” based on AI in order to mimic the professional camera look.

When we talk about focus, we are really talking about depth of field. You can google this for a better explanation, but basically it means that the focus is set to a certain distance from the lens and anything closer or further away becomes blurry. The bigger the camera sensor/lens is, the more shallow you can make the focus. In other words dslr/mirrorless cameras have bigger sensors and therefore a naturally shallow depth of field that gives that beautiful blurred background that everyone loves and sees as “professional”. iPhone and other smartphone sensors are small and cannot create this naturally so they use some sort of AI to select the subject and blur out everything else regardless of if it is closer or further away. It never really looks right and can never replace the natural analogue blurring that a real lens creates, at least not without some manual editing to select specifically what to blur. You can see this yourself if you edit your iPhone photo you took in portrait mode. You can literally select your focus after the fact. This is because with a small sensor like this, basically everything will be in focus in the “raw” photo.

So the first thing I’d like to refute is the idea that these orbs that look almost like electrical energy are simply out of focus planets. I see “that’s Venus out of focus idiot!” Posted A LOT. And everyone is quick to copycat and say “yeah this idiots never used a camera” to sound smart. This is how misinformation spreads so fast. I’m here to say that in all of my years in photography I’ve never seen something out of focus appear as sharp as these orbs. Anything out of focus isn’t sharp. These orbs are fairly sharp though.

I’d also like to refute the idea that they are lens flares. While lens flares are unique to each lens and can be considered more or less desirable depending on the photographer/filmmaker, I’ve never seen a lens flares that wasn’t a variation of a circle, hexagon/octagon based on the number of aperture blades in the lens. They don’t create weird artifacts like you see in these orb photos.

Both of these ideas are based on images taken with a mirrorless or dslr camera. I don’t do much phone photography so I can’t comment too much on if something weird is happening in-camera in regards to those photos, but I am confident that if the photo came from a mirrorless or dslr then “out of focus” or “lens flare” are NOT reasonable explanations.

I’d love to hear from other people who work in photography and video. This is my explanation based on my own experiences and would love to hear any evidence from others to the contrary. I haven’t seen any UAPs in real life myself so maybe something really weird is happening in the photo taking process and I’m just not aware of it because I haven’t had the opportunity to photograph this particular phenomenon.

EDIT: People are asking for an example of what I’m talking about and of course I can’t find the post/image that inspired me to write this. If I find it I will add it or if someone else comments it I will point it out. It was fairly close up (most likely cropped in as resolution wasn’t great) and showed a yellow orb that looked almost electrical. This is the post that had the majority of the comments I’ve seen about these being out of focus planets.

I’d also like to add that anything posted here could be entirely fake and 100% AI generated so it’s hard to truly believe any photo or video. I mostly wanted to dispel rumors about detailed photos simply being “out of focus”. If someone says that and the photo is generally blurry then they are probably right. I’ve just seen it as an excuse to write off any orb photo blurry or not.