PORTRAITS WITH FLARE

Mike Harris turns harsh light into a feature by shooting into the sun to create a lens-flare portrait

- Mike Harris

15 MINS There are many ways to avoid lens flare. You can attach a lens hood, alter the angle of your shot, block incoming light, or choose to shoot at certain times of day to mitigate this often unwanted phenomenon. But, used intentionally, lens flare can be an effective way to spice up your outdoor portraits.

The stylised aesthetic is particularly useful if you want to obscure a boring or overly busy background, or make use of harsh, unflattering sunlight. You don’t need any specialist kit to produce great lens-flare portraits, but zoom lenses are more prone to lens flare than primes. It also stands to reason that lenses without top-notch anti-reflective coatings will be more susceptible to flare, but how intense you want the effect is a matter of taste. We’d recommend experimenting with the lenses you own.

The angle of the sun is also a big consideration, since you’ll be shooting towards it. We shot our image during the evening golden hour, and while the warm light looked great, the sun was also lower in the sky so it was easier to frame. If you choose to shoot around midday – when the sun is higher in the sky – you’ll be forced to shoot up towards your subject, which isn’t the most flattering angle for a portrait. Finally, the intense light can play havoc with your camera’s autofocus, but you can overcome this by using manual focus, or by blocking the light and locking your focus before unblocking the light and firing the shutter.