Recently, I had to take pictures of a rather dull motive. There wasn’t much space, it was dark and the available light was yellow-ish and ugly.

Already before I thought about how I could make this scenery a little more interesting to look at it and got an idea. I decided to try working a little more creatively with my flash with the purpose to create lens flare.

I often like lens flare, but usually I take photos of them when an available light source creates them. By shifting either the motive’s or my position, I would control the amount and quality of it.

However, I never actually planned and tried to take a flash and simply point it towards my lens only with the purpose to create flares.

I’m very happy with the outcome and will use it more often in the future. Adding lens flare in Photoshop of course gives you more flexibility, but sometimes it’s very obvious that they were added in post.

Here’s a shot where I first got lens flares by accident and then tried to implement them consciously:

A little bit was added in post to highlight the effect.