Hi Wayne, I took a look at your pictures, and I'm in the "reflection" column I'm afraid. Reasons? As you say the stone has it's "back" to the Sun so the faces of all objects behind the camera will be brightly lit. The stone has been highly polished so even with the inevitable weathering it will still be highly reflective (well, "highly" when compared with a regular "cut" stone.) Without being able to see what was just behind where you took the picture from I would have to guess that there was a nice bright white tomb stone which was getting full sun and which you were seeing a reflection of. (Alternately, could there have been someone standing behind you dresses in light colored clothing?) A far less lightly explanation could be an image caused by the near head-on sunlight being bounced around in the lens of your camera. There's a fancy name for the effect which eludes me for the moment but basically it's when the camera lens is facing towards the Sun and a very pale, distorted, image of the Sun gets superimposed on the regular straight through image. Generally these "ghost" images are larger and appear to "float" over the actual picture where your "unknown" seems to be a part of the stone's image. It's not so rare to get these "unexpected" flaws in photographs. When we are taking the photograph we are concentrating on the details we want - in this case the writing I'd guess - and we tend to mentally edit out "irrelevant" variations in the background, or images which are on a very different scale. I think you'll see what I mean if you just look at your photo. You can either look at your ghost or you can look at the lettering. You can't concentrate on both at the same time. Malcolm PS: Have you thought about taking a large sheet of white cardboard or, better still, a large flat sheet of aluminum foil with you when you go head stone "prospecting?" You can use it to reflect light onto a shadowed stone's face (as in this case) or to cast an oblique light across the face of an incised stone to help the lettering to show up. It's not destructive or intrusive and shouldn't offend anyone. Archive CD Books Canada Inc. President: Malcolm Moody PO Box 11 Manotick Ontario, K4M 1A2 Canada. (613) 692-2667 WEB SITE: http://www.ArchiveCDBooks.ca > Message: 1 > Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2007 17:58:15 -0400 > From: "wcook" <wcook@rogers.com> > Subject: [CAN-ONT-SIMCOE] Ghost picture? > To: <CAN-ONT-SIMCOE@rootsweb.com> > Cc: ONTARIO-L@rootsweb.com > Message-ID: <000701c7f32c$8657f390$4c06784a@wayne> > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; > reply-type=original > > Hi List, > > Last week I was out photographing a cemetery on Fairgrounds Road just > southwest of Stayner called East Nottawasaga, when I got home and > started > working on the photos I got this strange image of possibly a child > and a > halo above its head. Now you've probably thinked I've finally gone > bonkers > and am now ready for the funny farm, I went back today and checked > out the > stone and it is as clean as a whistle. So you be the judge. What is > it. > Check it out at the special page below. > > http://www.waynecook.com/ANGEL.html > > > Cheers