Lens Flare

As mentioned in a previous post on visual aesthetics I explained how Rust & Bone had used lens flare to emphasize the main character's leaving of the house. To test if it would be possible to do in our film and to work out how I did a short recce.

 

This video is using normal exposure simply seeing the effect on the lens that having the sun centered in the frame had. As shown the sun created only a few lines across the lens and caused part of the frame to be blindingly bright where the sun is.

 

These videos show how movement of the camera and zooming in affects the sun's effect on the lens. As shown there was little to no change in effect and when zoomed close in on the sun the shot was ruined by the entire frame being overly filled with light

 

This video was to see how the sun shining through a tree would change the effect. As shown the tree was very thin and therefore the sun was never fully obscured by the tree, this meant that once again there was little change in effect on the lens.

 

In this video I tried using a larger exposure (+2) to see how that changed the effect. I found that because the larger exposure let more light through, too much light was actually captured and the screen was far too full of light allowing for very little definition of anything else. However I also tried in this video the how the sun changed when filmed through a thicker tree. I found the effect of this to be that the sun flashed in and out of view giving some variation between a frame filled with light, and one without where it was easier to distinguish other objects in the frame. The flashing also meant that there were far more streams/lines of sunlight crossing the lens.

Finally this video shows lens flare when using the manual focus on the camera to shoot slightly out of focus.

To conclude, this recce has shown me that if we are able to use lens flare in our film it is important that there is camera movement to get the effect of the sun flashing in and out of view. And it is also important to leave the exposure on 0 (providing the sun isn't behind the clouds) so that the frame is not overfilled with light.

TB