A ghost vortex–defined by some as a line that indicates an active passageway to the ‘other side’–can be thrilling to discover among your ghost pictures.

However, if you aren’t careful about camera straps, you may not know if it’s a vortex or something far more mundane.

Important: This article is not intended to ‘debunk’ all ghost vortex photos. This article is about the importance of keeping camera straps out of the way.

These first two (at right and above) aren’t ‘real’ photos. I Photoshop’d each of them using camera strap pictures and cemetery photos. The orbs are the only real anomalies in these two pictures.

(All of the other photos on this page are real and not retouched or altered.)

I did this to make a point: Our test photos were generally taken on my patio, avoiding any real anomalies.

However, if you saw these same pictures with a creepy house or cemetery in the background, you might think that they each show a real ghost vortex.

Like many ghost hunters, I used to look for aclear entry and exit points in the frame of the photo. If I could see one (or two), the photos probably wasn’t a ‘vortex’. It showed a camera strap like the picture at left.

If there was only one connection with the edge of the photo, I considered it a possible anomaly… even a vortex.

I wasn’t being critical enough.

WHAT WE LEARNED

Hardware around the camera lens can cast a shadow on the camera strap so that it appears to vanish.

It can have just one visible contact with the edge of the photo… or it can appear suspended, like the photo at the bottom right, below. It can also appear translucent, or seem to be in back of a solid object.

The following are some of our test photos. None have been altered in any way, except to scale their dimensions–which were kept proportionate–for this display.

Imagine any of them blurred so the texture of the strap was less obvious.

Imagine any of these with a gravestone or ‘haunted’ site in the background, or with the ‘vortex’ pointing towards a friend in the picture.

It could look pretty convincing …even scary.

When you take photos, loop the camera strap around your wrist if it’s short, or around your neck if it’s longer. That’s the only way to prevent confusion about vortex photos.

All of these photos were taken with a FujiFilm FinePix A345 digital camera. For more results of our camera strap experiments, see Strange shapes and camera straps and Ghost pictures and ‘floating’ camera straps.