Embrace The Flare ...

sun setting @ heinz field, originally uploaded by pr9000.

I've always been a sucker for lens flare.

Not familiar with lens flare? Here's the nerdy Wikipedia definition; the photo above, taken as the sun was setting last weekend while I attended the Steelers-Chargers playoff game in Pittsburgh, is a bit easier to understand. Basically, it's the artifacts from the sun when you point your camera pretty much directly into it, or at least allow the sun to be in the field of vision of your lens:



For some people, lens flare is a problem, and I can understand the point: it adds (sometimes) unneeded distraction from a well-composed photo, and it blows out color and contrast values, so that photos with lens flare seem washed out, grainy and otherwise unable to be salvaged into something pretty.

But I say you should embrace the flare! In the right situation, flare enhances the photo. Take the shot above: Without it, I just took a picture of the ramp at a stadium. With the flare, it invokes the mood -- a snapshot of an early January afternoon quickly disappearing into a cold midwinter night ...

I'm not saying lens flare is good in every photograph; I work hard to eliminate it most of the time, either by use of a lens hood, my hand, a piece of paper, a hat, or some element of the thing being photographed ... but there are times when the well-chosen inclusion of a lens flare adds a crucial bit of "color" to your photograph.