What causes the vertical flare or sparkle pattern in this photo?

[ed_avis2]

<p>

<p>Roughly where the tree trunk is in the background you see a sparkly white artefact. What causes that? This is a crop from a larger photo taken with a 50mm lens - no filter was on the lens and I don't see any obvious scratches on it. I have not seen this artefact before but it appeared in three photos taken at the same position.</p>

[jamesgysen]

<p>My immediate guess is lens flare. The shooting direction is right for it if you look at the tree's shadows, and the highlight shape is oval. A look at the original un-cropped photo would be the only true way to confirm IMO if you can post it. </p>

 

[jcuknz]

<p>The camera is facing the direction of the sun and although the trees are shading most of you and the camera I suspect a little beam of light is actually shining on the camera lens and being reflected around in the camera to give that area of lightness. It is worth getting the hang of shading the lens with your left hand while taking the photo with your right hand when shooting towards light sources.</p>

[dave_wilson1]

If you do use a filter make sure it's a good coated one like a Hoya HMC or B+W and that it's clean.

[wogears]

<p>About the only thing I cannot glean from the INCREDIBLY lengthy EXIF data on this image is whether or not you were using a lens hood. Were you?</p>

[Alan Marcus]

<p>Lens flare is always present. We are taking about misdirected light that bathes the film or chip during the exposure. Every lens produces flare, if it is uniform, it mainly reduces contrast. All modern camera lenses are compound , meaning they are constructed by sandwiching together an number of individual glass elements. The idea is to correct optical errors (aberrations). The bad news is, each element has a shinny surface that reflects a small percentage of the light. These reflections are the source of flare. Modern lenses are coated on all surfaces with a thin film that reduces but does not eliminate reflections.</p>

<p>When you point the camera in or near a bright light, a high number of these bright rays will reflect from several of the glass surfaces. A lens hood is a circular shade that shields the lens from off center stray light. These hoods / shades go a long way towards alleviating flare.</p>

<p>Lens flare is one of these necessary evils in realm of photography. All we can do is use a lens hood and be mindful that flare is likely when we shoot into the light or in the direction of strong reflections. When we mount a filter, we are mounting another glass element. Good fitters are coated and this helps somewhat. Bottom line is, we take the good with the bad. In addition, practice makes us more aware. Good photographers are good observers of their surrounds. </p>

[ariel_s1]

<p>Photography is capturing the light that is reflected off of the subjects, and focused onto the sensor by a lens. The kind of artifacts you see in your photo is from where the light source is shining directly onto your lens, instead of bouncing off of the subject first.</p>

[ed_avis2]

<p>Thanks for the replies. I've seen flare and ghosts before but never in this particular form. What I found unusual is its vertical 'Star Trek transporter' shape, when I would expect stray light inside the lens to give a generally round-shaped or cloudy artefact on the picture.</p>

<p>Looking closely there is a speck of dirt stuck on the front of the lens, but I guess that couldn't be the cause? Yes, I was using the lens hood (and the front element of the lens is deeply recessed anyway).</p>

<p>I cropped the picture because the photo.net guidelines for this forum say in stern words that photographs wider than 700 pixels or 300 kilobytes will be deleted (though perhaps they do not apply when just linking to an image?). Anyway I will post the full image tonight.</p>

[ann_overland]

<p>Like Ariel says, "photography is capturing the light that is reflected off of the subjects". I think this is what happened here, too. But the light waves probably met an obstacle before or after being reflected off the subjects. The obstacle could have been water droplets in the air. When the light waves meet the water droplets at a certain angel, a pattern is formed. I am not 100% sure, but I believe this it is light diffraction.<br>

<br /> I made a crop from the original size photo you posted at flickr and saturated it to emphasize the rainbow colored zigzag pattern. I hope you don't mind :-)</p><div></div>

[jcuknz]

<p>Even if you have a deep lenshood there are occassions when using the hand as an 'extension' of the hood toshade the lens is worth doing :-)</p>

[ed_avis2]

<p>Here's the full image: