The art of lens flares

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wastedyouth

New member
I was hoping to get some more information about properly doing in camera lens flares. I have a shoot coming up and I would like to play around with lens flares on set. I know its way overdone but I'm still eager to do some. I don't want to just shine a light directly into a lens and see what happens hah. What kind of different effects do you get with different light sources? Is there a specialty flash light to get the certain flares as seen in JJ's Star Trek or the new Total Recall reboot?

Any info would be awesome, thanks!
 
The lens flares you're talking about are due the anamorphic lenses these movies are shot on.

You can also add these (if you're shooting normal spherical lenses) in post - ie in After Effects etc with the Video Co-Pilot series.

You can also add a streak filter to get some of these effects in camera too...
 
If you are talking about the horizontal lens flares, yes those are on 2x anamorphic lenses. The 1.3x anamorphic lenses and very modern anamorphics with modern coatings don't do this as much as the 2x vintage lenses, so don't expect the same results from all ana's.

There are filters made to do this in camera. Many are affordable, some are not. Results vary. I am familiar with the Vantage Blue-vision streak filters. http://www.vantagefilm.com/en/news/index_28.shtml

At the time, the employee at Otto Nemenz told me they were the most expensive filters they had... so don't ask about the price to buy. :)


When it comes to flaring a lens, you want very small and bright specular light sources shooting down the barrel. The location of these also depend on success of flare. There are sweet spots on a lens. Do your homework before and run tests. Here is a very famous DP doing some tests at Clairmont. I have used many of these anamorphic sets from Clairmont, and must say the Clairmont brand is a wonderful mesh of vintage qualities with small and light form. Used them on three different projects with great success.

Here you can see some tests by Claudio Miranda, ASC on anamorphic lens flare tests: http://www.claudiomiranda.com/lenstest/index.html


There are different types of flares, imo. I don't like the very sharp and defined flares, as much as I like the broader source soft wide contrast reducing ones.

I also like the light-leak effects of free lensing. I'm currently building a special lens mount that will allow for the lens to be seated correctly and tightly but will allow for a variable amount of light leakage to come through and pollute the sensor. This will be absolutely beautiful! I have other things in the works too.

You have to love optics. Optics make all the difference in the world!
 
I think Videocopilot flares are pretty advanced. I will always prefer the real thing, as i feel post flares often don't feel the same (although I've been fooled a time or two.) From what I can tell, these plugins are excellent solutions to when you need a lens flare from an artificial light source such as CG lighting or objects. Basically when there is no way for a real flare.

A great example are CG animated rockets or space ships. Of course they are going to need CG flares, since they are CG lights on CG models! :)
 
The anamorphic lens is the only way to get the complete look right. The three key elements are the flare, the vertically stretched bokeh and the vertical resolution (and some distortion at the edges of the frame). The vid-atlantic filter will give you the stretched bokeh and the flare. The streak filter just the flares. Software post solutions can fake all the elements but it can look fake. Anamorphic lenses that are sub-$2000 are a PIA to use. You can't really rack focus, each shot the set up needs to be checked and with a 16:9 sensor the stretch factor is too much. Looks beautiful though.

The vid-atlantic has some limitations in that some circumstances the aperture flares will have a line through them but it is only at extremes, you can easily work around this. It also experiences a stop of two of light loss, not a problem with a good low light camera or a sufficiently lit scene. The streak filter has no limitations that I know of other than the flare is all you get (assuming you actually want the complete anamorphic look).

A half decent anamorphic will be around $300-1000 for an adapted projection lens. The vid-atlantic is about $120. I've seen new streak filters as low as $25-75, if you can find them. Software varies, so does the quality. I haven't used it so I wouldn't know what to recommend but the results if applied tastefully can be pretty good and you can put the flares where you want them so there is an element of artistic control without the time pressure of getting the shot and moving on.
 
My un-coated (or primitively coated) lenses get pretty spectacular flares all the time. The lens doesn't HAVE to be anamorphic. Anamorphic flare looks different, but any lens will flare. That's why they coat them (now).
 
Here is a tip worth playing with. Its kind of "indie" but effective .

We used to apply a little nose grease (or vaseline) to an optical flat and paint in the flare with a finger tip or a cotton bud.

It really takes very very little... so be subtle and experiment. (Have some iso prop on hand to clean the filter.)

And yes ..spectrals sources make the flares. Try moving them around in shot. Try a single LCD element torch as source. (we never had these 25 years ago though unfortunately)
 
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