All true.

It's not completely clear to me whether the camera used was digital or conventional.

The photographer has stated:

"I couldn't see the discharge with my own eyes, but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it," the photographer previously said. "But I'm not going to speculate about what it might be."

(my emphasis)

The article stated that the camera "...was a Nikon M-880 mounted on a tripod. The automatically timed exposure of four to six seconds was triggered by finger."

I can find no reference to a Nikon M-880, but there is a Nikon Coolpix 880, a 3-megapixel digital camera, with 2.5x zoom, and autoexposure up to 8 sec.

Weird, very puzzling artifacts do occasionally turn up on digital images too - I've seen them myself.

My call here is that the photographer was just sloppy in his use of language, the "M" in 880 above was prefixed to indicate "model", and the camera in question is in fact the Coolpix 880.

Time will tell, but I'm keeping an eye on this one.

sp