An Informal Test for Excess Flare in my Primary Work Zoom. Test inconclusive but promising....

I have to confess that I do like a certain amount of flare; as long as it's not excessive. I know some quick ways to get as much flare as you'd ever want. You could put an uncoated "protection" filter on the front of your lens, clean the filter with some spit and a wipe on a shirttail and then shooting into the light, or you could inadvertently (or purposefully) get some oily goo on your unprotected front element and ignore it while shooting into the light, or you could just buy a cheap lens. And few lenses do flare like an 18-500mm zoom...

I like to see how well my lenses can handle flare so sometimes, when we're shooting and I've got the actual shot covered, I'll move the camera over to get a light directly in the frame. You know, just to see what happens when a 1K is shining all over my front element. 

Yesterday I was shooting behind the scenes at a TV commercial production and I moved over to put a light in my shot. I'll also confess that I like a well intentioned (and well motivated) backlight; especially if we are photographing people in black in front of mostly black backgrounds....

I was using the Fujifilm 16-55mm f2.8 near wide open and snapped a frame with the light near the center and a different angle with the light near the right hand, extreme edge of my frame. These are the end result. Not too shabby. I can live with that amount of flare in exchange for the visual happiness of having the light inside the "box" and getting such a nice, deep shadow from the dancer closest to the light. 

I was happy to see that there was no blurry flare patch and no repeating flare artifacts spread across the frame. 

Camera: Fuji X-H1

Lens: Fuji 16-55mm f2.8

Lighting, tungsten

Client: Zach Theatre