This recent feature picture with pretty light also has lots of lens flare. But rather than degrading the photo and requiring lots of photoshop work to overcome it, the flare, to me, is aesthetically pleasing.

It's a wide-angle shot, so it has the common string of "ghosts"-- those colored spots in are usually in a line from the light source through the center of the uncropped photo. Besides the ghosts, it also what look like rays emanating from the sun (which is out of the frame).

This shot got me thinking about other examples of flare that looks good. Such as this old shot:

The flare in this wide angle shot of an avalanche canon (a recoilless rifle in military parlance) washes out the parts of the canon next to the fireball and the guy on the left. Should I try to compensate for that in photoshop? Not at all.

Also note that the shadows throughout the shot are red, which is caused by the wash of stray light flooding the rest of the image from the fireball.

This shot also has little ghosts, which are not lined up as they were in the previous example. They're from tiny droplets on the front of the lens. Their shape shows that the lens has a seven-bladed aperture. In the old days it could have been taken as evidence that I was a Nikon shooter, not Canon, whose lenses usually had 6 or 8 blades.

An aside: this is one the few shots that couldn't be done well with a digital camera. The tremendous dynamic range of color negative film was essential.

In this shot of a tall ship was with an 80-200 zoom. Any telephoto would produce similar flare, which is primarily a wash of reddish light that shows up mostly in the shadows. Notice that the far trees, which were dark, have been overwhelmed with the red light from the flare, but the water at left and right is bright enough that its blue color isn't overcome by the flare.

In this old shot of a worker on a log boom, taken with a 600mm telephoto looking toward a sunset, has that similar reddish effect, but added to it is the flare from that familiar string of ghosts.

Ghosts? What ghosts? Why don't we see them, you ask? These ghosts are so large that they more-than-fill the frame, so we don't see their edges.

The size of ghosts is determined by the curvature and spacing of the elements within the lens, but even more by the size of the aperture. The actual size of the aperture-- not just the f-number. The actual size is determined by the focal length and what f-number the lens is set to. The ghosts in wide angle shot, especially with a high f-number, are small. In a long telephoto, they're huge, even at f16.

Let's also note that the pastel effect isn't solely from flare. If you looked through a long black tube at the scene, the atmosphere itself would also show a warm glow.

This last shot-- a telephoto shot which happened to be taken a minute before the first shot at top-- demonstrates how the huge ghosts are created. The wash of color is green, not because the sun near the horizon was green, but because the collection of more-than-filling-the-frame ghosts are of various colors, they are overlapping, and, in this case, they add up to green.

And it sure doesn't look like what my eye balls saw.