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Lens Flare
Flare is created when pointing the camera’s lens directly at a light source, or very close to the light source. You can see flare in two ways. The first type of flare can be seen as a haze across an image that makes it look “washed out” and lacking in contrast and color saturation. A second way flare appears is as a visible artifact. Most often flare is created when photographing into the sun.
Zoom lenses tend to produce more flare than primes. Photographers can do a few things to avoid flare. One, is to tilt the lens so it neither includes or comes too close to the light source. A second way to avoid flare is by using a lens hood to eliminate the possible angles that bright light can hit the lens from.
Sometimes, photographers create or use flare purposefully in their photographs. As your eye becomes more attuned to seeing light in camera, you will be able to experiment with flare and see it before you take your photograph, and even play with where it appears within it!
This photograph has flare coming in from the right side of the photograph. The flare in this pictures is caused by flash being picked up by the lens, causing a bit of haze. To accentuate the haze we’ve added a light colored texture to the photograph.
The flare in this photograph is caused by the sun coming from above the barn. This flare could have been easily avoided by photographing from a higher angle, or moving the couple to a seated position.
This photograph’s flare is also coming from the sun. Here no flash or reflector is used to light the couple from the front and there is little detail seen in the subjects.
For this and other topics about lenses check out our An Advanced Analysis of your DSLR Camera course.
What is a DSLR Camera?
You may have heard the term DSLR or SLR before, but what is it? Well It’s a kind of camera. No doubt you’ve seen them, even if you didn’t know what they were called. They look like this:
DSLR or dSLR is short for Digital Single Lens Reflex. The Digital obviously means it’s a digital camera, and not a film camera, before the days of digital you just bought an SLR. But what is this SLR part?
SLR again stands for Single Lens Reflex. What that means is the camera has only a single lens to see through and take the picture with. The reflex part means that there is a mirror behind the lens which bounces the light to a place for you to view it. Most SLRs That mirror flips up to let light to the sensor when you take a picture.
When light enters the DSLR from the outside world it goes through the lens and hits a mirror in front of the sensor, that mirror is at an angle which bounces it up, and it goes into a special box above the lens that flips the image over and shows it to you in a little hole you look in called the view finder.
DSLRs are generally considered higher end cameras because the large sensors and optics tend to lead towards higher image quality. Most professional photographers shoot with some variation of a DSLR. They are popular primarily because you can change the lenses on them. Different lenses provide different abilities. For example with a wide angle lens you might be able to take a picture of an entire room at once. With a super telephoto lens you could take a picture of a bird in a tree across the street. Many DSLR owners purchase multiple lenses as well as other accessories which give them greater creative control to achieve the look the want. Shown below is a fairly typical DSLR owner’s collection of accessories including the camera itself on top of the gray bag (a DSLR camera with no lens is called a body) as well as 3 lenses, some filters, and other accessories.
Further Details For Camera Geeks
It is often erroneously claimed that the reflex refers to the mirror moving out of the way of the sensor when you take the picture, however understandable, this isn’t true. Prior to the invention of the SLR for many years (up until around the 1960 or 1970s) TLR or Twin Lens Reflex cameras were very popular, one lens you looked through using a mirror and the other took the picture. You may have seen them, they looked like this:
Back Lighting
Back lighting a subject is a way to add separation between them and the background. It also creates a great hair “glow” that is aesthetically pleasing in photographs.
The first two photographs have light coming not only from the back, but also from the front. The most challenging aspect to control when photographing a backlit subject is the exposure of the photograph. The brightly backlit background will force the camera’s meter to turn the subject very dark, almost creating a silhouette. The amount of frontal lighting necessary in order to show the color and detail of the subject is difficult to determine without a light meter or taking exposures, reading your histogram and changing lighting settings accordingly.
When backlighting using the sun, flare becomes an issue. Whether or not to include flare, and how to control it is an important decision the photographer must make. Were there no light, or significantly less light coming from the front the detail in the subjects would be lost.
The above photograph is back lit by the sun, and lit from the front by multiple flashes. If you would like to learn how to use multiple flashes in situations like these, you may consider taking Using Light: Multiple Flashes.
In this situation there was a very faint back-light provided by the window light coming through the house. To increase the amount of light a flash was inserted into the building and pointed towards the subjects from behind. Here a light from the front wasn’t a necessity, the hair light could have been minimized. A flash was used off-camera to provide richer color and catch lights in the eyes.
This image demonstrates backlighting without any light coming from the front of the subject. You can see the sun as it is setting on the beach, and the exposure chosen was just enough for one to make out the ocean in the background. If we had chosen to expose for the straw on the subject in this photograph, the sky would have been much lighter, and possibly even white. If you would like to learn more about how to use existing light in your photographs you may want to take the
Welcome to the Canadian Photography Learning Centre!
Welcome to our brand new web blog! The Staff at CPLC is planning to make this a blog to help you improve your photography and inspire you. We’re accepting guest posts, and suggestions for posts, just use the Contact Us page if you’ve got something you want to say to the world. If you’d like to suggest a topic for a future blog post feel free to comment on this post!
We’re going to start off our new blog with a series of posts on basic photography concepts including what ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field are. We’re planning one post in this series a week. We’ll also be answering your camera questions on the blog.
