hmm, what is this in my picture?

heyya POTN,

never thought i would make one of these threads, but something showed up in my picture yesterday that i cant quite explain myself.

All I have to say.... UFO's....

GRipp wrote in post #3769239
All I have to say.... UFO's....

+1...

Cleaned your sensor recently? i can't see Photobucket from here, but your description sounds like a piece of dust on the sensor - it'll be most visible at smaller apertures and on solid light areas with little detail.

stuff on left kinda looks like flare. almost has the edge of the aperture...stuff in upper right..no idea. smudge of some sort

I was going to say flare...but then I saw the other blotch on the upper right corner. Hmmm...ghosts?

What sources of light were there aside from the building itself? The "blot" on the upper right appears to have a roundish shape with pieces missing. I would guess that something in between a light source and your lens - tree branches, etc. - caused this particular flare/reflection to appear irregular.

BTW, did you use a lens hood?

Looks like flare to me.

GRipp wrote in post #3769239
All I have to say.... UFO's....

Ditto

Looks like moisture to me, I get that when I shoot in the rain or after cleaning on a humid day and I didn't wipe it off completely. Hopefully it's not in the camera/lens.

im almost positive its flare

dude... ORBS! they are like spirit particles!

p.s. j/k

Sorry - it's all flare - you get that when light reflects off the various internal lens elements.

Is this the whole picture, or a crop?

A common problem when shooting photos like this (bright lights, lots of darkness around them) is reflections off of the sensor being re-reflected back into the lens by a flat surface—a UV filter is the usual culprit, but the flat rear surface of the front element of the lens itself is another possibility (Canon and Nikon, at least, are now using meniscus front elements on their top lenses for this very reason).

However… those sorts of reflections have a very identifiable characteristic: they are positioned 180° from the original light source. If the bright light is in the lower left, the reflection is in the upper right. The position is due to the "billiard ball" bounce that the light takes off of the sensor. These look like reflections, but there is nothing similar at the 180° points. So if this is the whole picture, then that's not what those are and you can forget this entire posting.

It looks like dust specs on the left, but the right is weird. Maybe a strange internal reflection issue similar to flare.