post sample images of lens flare

[Teodor Oprean]

This page sparked my interest in the look of different large format lenses with regards to direct flare.

http://www.kpraslowicz.com/2010/11/20/flare-factor/

If you have tested your lenses for this characteristic, please share them.

Christpher Perez did a comprehensive test to measure real world resolution of lenses on film, but I'm not aware of a similar test that examines the look of flare in night time photographs.

In 35 mm I have used m42 SMC Takumar lenses with Hoya HMC color correction filters for night time photography on color negative film. Flare is very well controlled with those lenses -- almost non-existent. Maybe the filters (80B + 80C) introduced a little bit of flare, but it never looked prominent in any of my pictures.

So far I have taken only two photographs that resemble the Raptar sample image.

http://500px.com/photo/2261186

There is only a hint of flare in the left half of this photo, probably caused by the stacked filters and lens hood rather than the optics of the lens.

http://500px.com/photo/2261180

Bright lights shining directly into the lens merely exhibit the star pattern.


Teodor

[jcoldslabs]

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but here is a shot with an Aero-Ektar on Polaroid type 51 film that shows circular flare:




Jonathan

[Teodor Oprean]

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of.

[Teodor Oprean]

I noticed more and more lately that filmmakers occasionally make use of direct lens flare in a very controlled manner.

Stanley Kubrick used lens flare very deliberately in 2001 for the model shots of the space capsule returning to the spaceship after collecting the body of the dead astronaut. It's an interesting shape of flare. It looks very much in tune with the theme and iconography of the space race of the 1960s. It's made up of two red colored surfaces punctured by a singularity in the middle, intersecting each other, and being contained within a sphere. Maybe that's the kind of flare you can get with multicoated Double Gauss lenses. The flare moves very precisely and slowly to maintain a perfect composition. Also the camera holds the shot for a long time by anybody's film viewing standards.

I think that in the B picture "Fourteen Hours" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043560/) the lens flare produced by the giant searchlight shining straight into the camera at the key scene towards the end was carefully planned to look the way it did.

The shots at the beginning of "Tree of life" with the sun shining towards the camera between the branches and leaves of a tree produced a flare that I think looks great. Maybe that was a modern cinema zoom lens. It had many copies of the aperture in several colors surrounded by a couple of thin, concentric circles.

Not that any of this is in any sense important. It's just a small detail that never really registered with me in the past. Recently I started to notice this.

Teodor

[jcoldslabs]

The first film that comes to mind when I think of lens flare is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The circular flare that accompanies the lights of the spacecraft adds to the otherworldly effect. This is strange, since the flare is a result of real-world optics!

Jonathan

[Jody_S]

The shots at the beginning of "Tree of life" with the sun shining towards the camera between the branches and leaves of a tree produced a flare that I think looks great. Maybe that was a modern cinema zoom lens. It had many copies of the aperture in several colors surrounded by a couple of thin, concentric circles.


Teodor

Sort of like this?

[Teodor Oprean]

Yes, similar to that, but obviously the Pixar sample image was computer generated. It's not a real flare, just an imitation of one.