Whenever orbs are captured on photographs, the possibility that it is merely dust or something similar must be looked into and accepted as a possible explanation for some occurences. Some people are convinced that all orbs are due to dust in one shape or form, this however raises the question of why there is a far lower number of orbs captured on conventional film cameras than on digital cameras. On the Additions link I will go into the standard camera - digital camera scenario. When dust is used as the reason behind orbs, there are two different arguments again - one whereby it is claimed that the dust creating the orbs is present on the camera lens, the other whereby dust in the atmosphere is blamed.
The first argument of dust on the camera lens is invalid for two reasons: Firstly it would not increase the incidence of orbs on digital cameras as opposed to film cameras. Secondly, any dust present on the lens would not appear on the photograph and it certainly would not appear as a small orb as being so close to the lens, it would appear greatly magnified in size which, incidentally, would also make it appear more opaque - hence the dust is not visible. As the apparent size increases, the apparent density decreases.
This leaves the argument of dust in the air which is more plausible and indeed possible. When light reflects off the dust particles and those particles are not in the cameras set focus-range, they can appear orb-like, being diffuse, greyish-white in colour and fairly transparent. Orbs tend to be more numerous when camera flashes are used, which would support this idea as the strong light being emitted from the flash could bounce off the dust and being such a strong light, it would make the dust particles quite bright.
If you look at purposely faked photos where large amounts of dust or scratched-off toilet paper have been used, you can see the difference between these orbs and what I call proper orbs. The faked ones are denser looking and have a central nucleus that is easily visible, this nucleus is the main dust particle while the diffuse blurry light-bubble around it is due to the particle being out of focus. A real orb has no discernible nucleus and can often be seen to contain interesting patterns inside the main sphere, sometimes with different 'layers' being visible. Also, in such staged photographs, the particles are easily visible to the naked eye whilst airborne and sometimes they only produce barely visible orbs on photographs despite the large particle size and quantity in the air. So why do there sometimes appear vast amounts of orbs on a photograph where there is no visible dust in the air or the enviroment is naturally fairly dust-free?
