Digital SLR Photography

60-Second Technique: Add Flare to Your Photos

By Caroline Schmidt. Posted

The summer months mean a high, bright, white sun for most of the day and while some portrait photographers’ shudder at the thought, it gives you the chance to embrace some hi-key delight.

Rather than shy away from the high sun to seek shade, shooting into the sun can introduce stylised artefacts, a white-wash effect and even partial silhouettes for a quick creative spin. Most modern lenses are anti-flare, anti-glare coated so you creating these happy mistakes isn’t actually as easy as you may think. If you want to embrace the imperfection, consider picking up a manual focus, screw-mount M42 lens (and adaptor) as you’ll replace complex coatings for chromatic aberrations, plenty of hexagonal lens flare and softness around the edges. Once you’ve got your kit, here’s how to use it:

1. Pick your time

It doesn’t matter what time to you shoot for flare, you’ll just need to adjust your camera angle to incorporate the orb of the sun. The sun tends to be brighter and whiter during the day, warming and softening the closer you get to sunset; most photographers prefer the latter unless they’re aiming for a bleached, hi-key style.

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2. Master metering

Your camera is going to try to compensate for the bright background by underexposing the scene, so either set manual mode or aperture-priority mode and prepare to use positive exposure compensation. Set your lens’s widest aperture and centre-weighted metering, if you’re exposing for the skin to white-wash the background, or multi-zone metering if you want a deeper tone and semi-silhouetted subject.

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3. Refine your focus

Autofocus will have a terrible time trying to lock onto your subject in backlighting so improve your chances of a sharp shot by manually focusing. Sometimes blocking the sun with your hand, locking focus on your subject before switching to manual focus can help, too. If you don’t want the artefacts streaming through your shot, try hiding the sun’s orb behind a tree, building or the subject’s head to just get the burst of brightness.

Pick up the September issue of Digital SLR Photography magazine, out 13 August, for a Photo Masterclass on naturally-lit location portraits.

Five M42 lenses worth finding:

Carl Zeiss Jena 50mm f/2.8
Vivitar 28mm f/2.5
Leica INDUSTAR 50mm f/3.5
Mamiya Sekor135mm f/2.8
Pentacon 29mm f/2.8

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From Digital SLR Photography store