Sunday 30 October 2011

An artefact

I love seeing strange things, scenes or items that grab my interest and get my mind going.

One such thing occurred as a result of a stroll along the Waveney on Wednesday. There had just been a heavy shower and a rainbow appeared across the river. I took a couple of quick snaps, but when I got home I discovered an artefact on the pictures:

Immediately before

The artefact
The artefact close-up
The rainbow's colour smear does not appear on the photo taken a few seconds before, or the one immediately after. As far as I can recall the sun was somewhere behind me. I cannot recall seeing it at the time, so I am guessing it is something to do with the photographic process.

So does anyone have any ideas what may have caused it?

(an aside: this blog post led to a debate between Sencan and myself about whether 'artifact' or 'artefect' is correct in UK English. It turns out that both are applicable, although 'artefact' is preferred. We are that sad).

2 comments:

AlanR said...

A drop of water on the lens perhaps. Which didn't pick up the light diffraction on the other shots.
A pure guess btw.

David Cotton said...

Hi Alan,

That was my first thought too, but there doesn't appear to be any distortion in the same place on the other images. However it must be something like that as I doubt it was caused by an actual atmospheric effect.

Another thought was that it might have been caused by the JPG being corrupted as it was saved to the camera, but again I doubt that.