Ahhhh! Lens flare!

baldmountain

I was setting up a shot for Mini-Challenge #68 "Home" and almost fainted when I saw the first shot in the LCD.



Yikes! Where did all that lens flare come from! I figured I'd have to run inside and get a big shade to protect the lens. But as an experiment I just used my hand to shade the lens. This is exactly the same image but you can see my hand at the top of the frame.



A little cropping and I get an image like this. Quite an improvement over the original image with nothing more than shading the lens with my hand. A little understanding that lens flare is caused by light bouncing around the lens and camera body and using a little improvisation gets you a shot. This one isn't good enough for the challenge, but it is presentable. Mostly.

This is the remains of an old abandoned house in the woods out behind our house. Being there you get this erie feeling that there are still ghosts hanging around. You can even see the path through the woods they used to get to the house when people lived there originally.

pathfinder

Lots of old timers ( like myself ) wear a hat with a large brim - It makes a great portable lens hood when needed to prevent lens flare

Nikolai

Geoff,
in a situation like yours the easiest thing to do is to reposition yourself ever so slightly to get the tip of the lens into the shade of one of the tree trunks. Ain't no need for nothin' else:-)

baldmountain

Oooo, good tips. I even have one of those floppy hats I got to use as a rain/sun hat when I go camping with my son and the Boy Scouts. It even has loops for film canisters that aren't big enough for flim canisters so it looks like a cool photographers hat.

Nikolai,

I should have realized that if I moved the sun behind a tree it would have eliminated the flare. I even know better and didn't think enough.

Scott_Quier

I don't think I qualify as an "old timer", but here's an example of my and my hat take at the Glacier MT shootout in 2007