A Lesson on Exposure and Lens Flare

As I learn to take specific types of photos and develop my skills, I'd like to take as many opportunities as I can to explain to others how I accomplished a certain look.  I like this photo not because it looks great (I think you'll agree that it's nothing special) but because it was a major success for me in learning a couple new skills.  First, I was trying to purposefully create lens flare.

Lens flare isn't usually referred to as a good thing but when you control it and use it as part of the overall intent of the image it can work wonders.  I won't dig into what causes lens flare but if you're interested you can check out this link from wikipedia.  Ever taken a picture of some friends in the middle of the day with the sun right behind them?  I bet most of those pictures had big bright circles right over your friends' faces that totally ruined the picture.  That's lens flare.  

We can use the same example to discuss the other teaching lesson in this picture.  With that afternoon, backlit shot of your friends, did they often show up as nothing but a dark silhouette?  The reason is that your camera usually takes into account the entire scene to determine how bright it needs to be.  When so much of the scene is filled with the bright mid-day sun, your friends are going to be significantly underexposed.  The result, silhouettes.  

So, for this picture I purposefully found an object that was light from behind.  I wanted to try to create some creative lens flare that didn't detract from the image so I composed the shot so that I could barely see the edge of the sun.  I knew if any of the sun was seen by the lens I would end up with flare and the sun would give me that cool star burst look.  

To keep the statue from becoming a silhouette I used spot metering and metered right off the middle of the flower and used a fill flash to brighten it up a little.  Spot metering is when the camera determines how bright a scene is by analyzing one spot instead of the entire scene.  Most advanced DLSRs have 3 metering techniques.  The first is matrix metering where the camera looks at the entire scene and gives an overall determination of how bright the picture should be to give a good exposure.  Center-weighted metering is when the camera again looks at the entire scene but it gives more weight to what's in the center of the image.  Spot metering is where you pick exactly where the camera looks and it only takes into account that very small area.  

So, here's the final result.  Once again, this picture was a great learning lesson for me in how to create and control lens flare and how to avoid creating a silhouette.  Lastly, it was a great hands-on lesson of learning that flash is really important, even in the middle of the day.  If you have any questions or would like more information, don't hesitate to post a comment.