Strange Blue Dot

meewolfie

I've had my 30D for about six days and have been taking lots of photos. Learning alot by trial and error, then going back and reading the manual and learning some more. Each day I'm making a little progress.

Today I took a bunch of photos in the park - heavy foliage and overhanging cliffs, so the light was low. I was using a little travel tripod and some of my exposures were up to 30 seconds long.

After downloading my images, I picked this one as one that I was pretty happy with (some tree roots), but noticed this stray blue cloudy dot.


EXIF Info for this photo

I don't think that this was out there in the park. Does anyone recognize this type of aberration? Could it be related to the long exposure time (30sec)? I retouched it out in the final photo, and probably won't worry about it unless I see it in multiple images.

There is a tremendous amount of expertise around these parts and was just curious if this was immediately recognizable to anyone!

Thanks!
Mary
(note - since I'm suspicious that this might be camera related, I'm posting in the camera section - if this post needs to be moved to another forum, I certainly understand!)

gluwater

It could possibly be dust on your sensor. It would only show up in small apertures and would be more apparent in long exposures. Did you check your lens to see if maybe something was stuck on it? But dust usually shows up as darker spots of low contrast, I have not seen it show up as white.

gtc

smudge?
it might be a finger grease smudge on your front element

meewolfie

Oh! I like the grease smudge answer. That's an easy one to fix.

I apologize if I seem a bit obsessive about this. I've read so much about how troubling it can be to get dust on the sensor, that perhaps I'm over-reacting.

If it is dust on the sensor, I'd probably be seeing the same spot on each image, right? (If it's a smudge and I wipe it off, then that would fix it!)

Mary

Kodachrome

...strange blue creature in the trees

meewolfie wrote:

After downloading my images, I picked this one as one that I was pretty happy with (some tree roots), but noticed this stray blue cloudy dot.

...hmmmmm

There seems to be shadow from the leaves above casting a shadow on the blue thing...which rules out any problem with the camera...is this the whole image?

ziggy53

Mary,

[FONT=&quot]It sure looks like a bubble to me. It looks like the blue is reflected sky and iridescence, possibly an oily film on the bubble. I've seen these occur naturally in conditions like you describe.

That or a space alien! :

ziggy53
[/FONT]

meewolfie

Ziggy - you might be right. Although everything that I saw seemed to be green and brown and gray, we all know about the difference between what the camera sees and what we think we are seeing.

I did notice later on that there was an awful lot of sap flowing out of some of the trees (and may have ruined a pair of pants on this little photo adventure!). Though I didn't notice if there was sap on this tree, there definitely could have been.

Since, my little EOS manual is my bedtime reading these days, I did notice a little blurb about how long exposures could lead to aberrations like this - maybe an exageration of what was actually there - helped along by the long exposure time.

Thanks all for your feedback. :
Mary