Hi all, Please excuse me if this is a stupid question as I am new here and to the realm of understanding the paranormal.
I go to school in Gettysburg, PA. Today we went to Spangler's Springs and I took the following picture with the camera's flash off... I've never seen anything like this before. Does anyone happen to know what the heck the purple is about? It may not be anything, but I am very curious! Thanks for your time.

Hi, Great photo. Initially the fact you said you didnt use your flash, was a good thing when looking at it. The one thing I dont understand is why it casts a shadow in the water. Now is it possible that it was somehow reflecting off the water, or vice versa? I think others here are better at this than I am, so lets see what others think..Good Job..JN

That is pretty cool. I have no idea what it is, though. Then again, if you are Gettysburg, I am pretty sure I might have an idea what is is.

The shadow is something wrong with my camera. It has been doing that lately for awhile on all pics, but I cleaned my lense properly today before going to shoot. The camera I used for this pic is my junky camera, since I was just messing around seeing as it was daylight

Are you talking about the globby thing or the purple around the tree branches? The globby thing is lens flare, caused by a bright light source (the sun) hitting the lens at an oblique angle. There are actually lens hoods to combat this, but you can just use your hand as well.

The purple stuff is one of two things. The first is called chromatic aberration. It's caused by different wavelengths of light being refracted further than others in an optical system. Wide angle zoom lenses are notorious for this. The second possibility looks similar, but has a different cause. Purple fringing is usually sensor bloom. Sensor bloom happens when a pixel is overexposed and some of the charge spills over into adjacent pixels.

if it is a lighting differential thing, wally's answer rules

if its actually something paranormal, civil war souls perhaps?

thats an odd comment,you know your cam has issues,and you wonder why you have wierd pics?

These definately look like camera artifacts to me. If you look at the tree shadow, it seems that the camera is about 20-30 degrees off-axis from the sun, so you will get lens flare anomolies.

Meow Purr.