Hot answers tagged lens-flare
18
Uncontrolled light causes lens flare. This can be light that's reflected from internal lens surfaces, or that's scattered by imperfections in the glass.
If the flare is badly controlled, it will produce the dramatic lens flare artifacts which you've probably seen. More controlled flare will be diffused over the entire image, reducing contrast but not ...
17
That picture isn't taken with "natural lighting" -- there is a large "hot" reflector (probably a gold-toned or "zebra stripe" metallic type) to the left of the camera throwing light back into the subject.
Picture quality is rarely about the camera. It's about composition and lighting. Your camera may not be able to throw the background quite as far out of ...
16
This is lens flare, where reflections within the lens end up showing on your photos.
General guidance to minimise it includes:
Avoid getting the sun in shot (and ideally, avoid having it just-out-of-frame too)
Use a lens hood to shade the front element
Try to use lenses that have anti-reflective coatings
Keep the front element clean, but follow the lens ...
14
Thats actually a UV filter not an ND filter, very different filters :) Anyway, lower quality filters flare more, if you want to continue to use a UV filter consider a multi-coated filter. It seems other people who bought that same filter had similar complaints, see the 1st review:
"However, I had to return this item since they DON'T contain any ...
13
The scene you were shooting (bright spot light + darkness) is actually one that's most prone to flares. This happens will all filters, but some have less flare because they have better coating. Lens construction and coating of its elements also matters.
A simple comparison:
no filter
better filter (Marumi DHG Lens Protect)
worse filter (Hama UV 0-HAZE ...
12
In general a lens hood can help this, as can shading the lens with your hand (this if useful in the cases where the lens hood falls short of offering optimum flare protection, as is often the case with zooms, or full frame primes on APS-C). Shading only works when the lightsource is outside of the frame, however.
Of course the best way of avoiding flare is ...
11
Those are almost certainly reflections from the UV filter. I recommend taking it off.
This is a topic of much debate, but the fact is filters do cause artifacts visible in your photos — you've got the evidence right there. You can get better results from a more expensive filter, but then it'll cost almost as much as your lens. Lenses aren't as fragile as ...
10
Looks like a shutter malfunction (which fits with it only appearing at certain shutter speeds). The shutter is made of a series of metal blades, it looks like one of these blades is misaligned, which is exposing that part of the sensor for longer than it should be, hence the bright area.
You can have the shutter replaced at a Canon service centre.
9
A lens hood won't do you much good if the light source is in the frame.
In this case, the things to do are (a) use high-quality, well-coated lenses, designed for digital if you're doing that (i.e., the rear element is coated) and (b) minimize extra glass in the optical path - remove UV filters, etc.
8
You can get all sorts of interesting shapes and colours when shooting directly into a lightsource like that. All pieces of glass reflect a certain amount of light and transmit a certain amount, so you actually get flare from everything in your scene every time you shoot, only it's usually much dimmer than the rest of the picture so you don't see it.
When ...
8
Yes grease and smudges can cause flare, but instead of well defined circles or lines you are more likely to get an overall clouding effect with a visible glow around highlights and lightsources.
In fact it used to be a common technique with glamour and some portrait photographers to smear vaseline on a lens in order to get flattering (if cheesy) soft focus ...
7
The main two things that I have found to be helpful when trying to achieve the sunburst effect are:
Stop the lens down to at least f/16. I usually start at f/22 and work my way wider if I'm not satisfied with the effect. Note that each aperture will give a slightly different sunburst effect.
Expose for the sky. Without a flash or reflector, your foreground ...
7
This does look like some kind of flare, I can't tell if this is caused by the lens or the UV filter but filters (especially "not so expensive" ones) are know to cause flare.
To avoid flare you just have to prevent the light coming directly from the sun from hitting the front of your lens, this is what the lens hood does when the sun is outside the frame.
...
7
This shot has been taken with star 4 filter.
You could simulate it with photoshop, but I prefer to put a filter and have that effect while shooting.
There are multiple different start filters: star 4, star 6, star 8 - number tells how many streaks from each strong light point you will get.
As for the second part, it does not matter outdoors or indoors, as ...
7
What you are seeing in the photo is not lens flare. It is an inverted and reversed reflection of the brightest highlights of the scene. If you were to draw an x and y axis intersecting in the center of the photo, then the bright light on top of the building just left of the vertical axis is reflected the same distance below the horizontal center line and the ...
6
Looks like flare caused by some kind of oily residue on the lens. I wouldn't say you have permanently damaged it, although that may be a remote possibility if you scratched it or maybe etched away any of the multicoating.
I would find some photographic lens cleaning solution and a nice microfiber cloth, a soft camel hair brush or a LensPen, and try to ...
6
I suspect what's happening is one of the following things.
Lens flare. This occurs usually when you have a bright source of light off to a side, and makes some usually hexagonal shaped images appear in your light, as seen below. The cure is to keep the light from said external sources from reaching your lens, and to keep your lens clean. Using a lens hood ...
6
If you're talking about the strange arcs like in the bottom left corner of this picture:
Then it's just flare caused by shooting into a lightsource. Concert lights tend to produce strong flaring effects as they are very focussed.
The only fix is to use a different lens (they all flare differently) or not shoot directly into any lightsources. However when ...
5
Exposing the moon for 46 seconds is an EXTREMELY long time. The moon is going to track across the sky during that whole time, creating a trail as it goes. Unless you have a tracking mount (either alt/az, which will track accurately for short periods of time, or a German equatorial, which will track for indefinite amounts of time), you can, at most, expose ...
5
The flare is likely to wash out contrast, regardless, but that too can make the scene work better. I'm not really sure that you can change that except, perhaps, using HDR techniques.
In any case, some of the more effective uses of flare that I've seen are with images that are silhouettes, where the beams stand out against the dark foreground. The other ...
5
As has been said this is the result of lens flare. Lens flare is caused by a point source light in the field of view of the camera. In this picture that source is the sun. But you can see this effect with other point sources such as a lamp, flashlight, or headlight.
Another factor in the intensity of lens flare is the aperture. A small aperture (large f ...
5
The elliptical flares were probably from an anamorphic lens. These lenses squash the image horizontally in order to get a widescreen picture on a standard width film strip. The anamorphic elements are usually on the front of the lens so the lens barrel appears elliptical to the camera.
Lens flares are just reflections so can take the shape of any lens ...
4
There's only so much you can control with camera adjustments; the rest comes from the nature of the scene.
In this case, for instance, if the sun were marginally higher in the sky, the "glowing ball" at the centre of the flare would not have eaten the tops of the distant dunes. On the other hand, it would probably have increased the coloured repeats, making ...
4
I think it's interesting that it's not uncommon to see lens flare added to CGI sequences (think SF space scenes). It's a fingerprint of the device (lens), and people may expect to see it when a bright light source is in the scene. In general I try to avoid it, but sometimes it works. My IR camera is particularly flare prone, so I try to incorporate it in ...
4
Lens flare is caused by a bright light source (such as the sun) shining into the lens (whether in the image or not) that has its light reflected and scattered inside the lens causing a wash out or a flare artifact. All lenses will be subject to this to a greater or lesser degree, but this most commonly manifests with wider angles.
There are mitigation steps ...
4
Movies typically use an aspect ratio that's wider than the frame on the film, so lenses are used to compress the image in the horizontal dimension. You're probably familiar with some of the brand names Cinemascope and Panavision -- these are lens systems that were/are used to record a wide image onto standard film, and then to project it again. This may ...
3
Basically, it's reflections.
Inside a lens, you want the light to travel from the front of the front element, to the back of the rear element, without bouncing off any surfaces.
There are two main surfaces, however, that light may bounce off.
The glass itself. Glass is reflective, obviously. Glass is shiny. So some light bounces off the glass elements ...
3
In addition to the reflector that Stan Rogers pointed out, one of the things that makes a huge difference is the time of day that you try a shot like this. Here in the northern US - this is a perfect time of the year to try shots like this. The sun is setting earlier in the evening, and the light becomes very soft, in addition to the great fall leave color.
...
3
Another thing to do to help reduce (but usually not eliminate completely) lens flare is to remove any filters you have on your lens. Each piece of glass between your subject and your camera sensor has the potential to add one (or more) additional circle.
I once noticed some terrible flare taking some photos of candles. When I removed the UV filter I had ...
3
Think of smudges, grease, and finger prints (usually caused by oil mixed with other things on your hands) as a semi-transparent mirror.
It causes light to refract and reflect at the points where the smudges and fingerprints are. As Matt pointed out, sometimes this is the desired effect for aesthetic appeal.
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