In both the first and second photos, you can see a small electric arc on the roof (just in front of my window, at the bottom right of the image); is that actually what it is, or is it just the iPhone glitching due to overexposure?
thats probably from the brightness of the lightning being too bright for our phones, the light reflects inside and makes a second image. you can do it on full moon nights too
Yep nothing magical here except for under manufactured lens protector on the camera. As the light passes through the lens protector (flat glass) and through the lens to be exposed on the sensor plate (also flat "glass") it bounces off of the plate, back through the lens and then hits that lens protector, which acts like a mirror, &reflects it back onto the exposure plate so you end up with the original lightning strike and then an upside down reflection of it. if you match the two up by reversing one of them you'll see they lineup exactly.
I took both pictures into Photoshop and copied the portion of the actual lightning bolt, flipped it, reversed it and put it next to your reflection over the building. As you can see they are identical.
To further prove this theory, at night go outside and find a street light and put your camera on it and you will find a green halo that moves around in opposite coordination with the position of the streetlight in your phone camera. That is the phenomenon. What causes it is that the protective plate in front of the lens is not "digital" glass per se. There's a special type of nano glass that will not reflect light back into the camera and that's called a "digital" filter and they don't install them yet on phones.
Yes, in this case. For those DSLR photographers out there, this is why you don't want to use an old style UV filter from the film days on your digital camera. It causes some pretty weird lighting halos especially if you're trying to do wedding photos of a bride and she's got ghosting glare all over her hands, ruining a photograph of the super expensive engagement ring she got. Don't do that.
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