Flare, you see it artificially inserted in many of our films these days. We can easily though insert flare into our photos anytime we want, and it’s the real kind. Working with flare takes a couple of important tools, a lens that flares nicely (with a clean element which I so often forget to do), a camera that can deal with the exposure range and most importantly, a clear view of the sun. In continuing my exploration of the D5, I put it to the task of flare and was so pleased how easily it works with it. That puts the pressure on the photographer to make it work with a photograph and not just an added fade.
In my handbook of working with flare, the first and most important reason of using it is to pull the eye through the image with pizzazz. The mind’s eye goes to light and bright first and with the brightness of the sun, the mind’s eye goes right to it. Using that knowledge permits you to place the sun in the frame pulling the eye to it first. By closing the lens down to its smallest aperture, you can quickly get the sun to create a sunburst, or flare and you have your start. I personally love to then working those flaring objects to create “rays” that move the eye through the rest of the frame, hopefully to a subject the viewer can then relate to before they eye wonders around through the rest of the frame. Doing this requires opening up the shadows in post (ACR in my case). This is where the D5 does such a marvelous job, permitting easy opening of the shadows. Of course, you have to do the correct job with the original exposure when you go click to make this all work. And that is for another post :-)