Lens Flare Photography: Five Causes You Can Fix Today

Travel gives you the scene. Patience gives you the photograph.

(my favourite quote this week)

Lens flare is not always a problem.

Sometimes it gives a photo mood. Sometimes it makes light feel alive. Sometimes that small glow around the sun makes the whole frame feel warmer.

But most of the time?

Lens flare is just a distraction.

It pulls attention from the subject. It lowers contrast. It adds random spots, streaks, or haze in places where you never wanted them.

Lens flare, for those still getting to grips with it, happens when stray light enters your lens and bounces around between the glass elements rather than going straight to the sensor. The result is either a dramatic streak across the frame, soft washed-out contrast (called veiling flare), or those telltale coloured blobs that drift around when you move the camera. Whether you love it or hate it depends entirely on the shot. Some photographers chase it. But when it ruins an otherwise sharp, deliberate image, that is a different matter altogether.

Here are the five causes I keep coming back to, because they are the ones that are actually preventable.

The best camera habit is not speed. It is pausing before the obvious shot.

This is the one that catches almost everyone. You are out shooting, maybe after a light shower, maybe in dusty conditions, and a few water droplets or specks of dust settle on the front of your lens. They are easy to miss when you are focused on the composition. But when there is a bright light source anywhere near your frame, those droplets and particles scatter the incoming light aggressively. What should be a clean background becomes a washed-out mess.

Water droplets are the worst offenders here. A single droplet can spread light across a huge area of the image in a way that is difficult to remove in post. Dust is usually more subtle, but it still contributes.

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple: keep a microfibre cloth in your pocket when you are shooting into the light, and check the front element regularly. It takes ten seconds and saves you considerably longer in editing.

A clean frame starts before the shutter. It starts with attention.

A lens hood is the most underused piece of kit most photographers own. The primary job of a lens hood is to block light from entering the lens at angles that do not contribute to the image. Light coming from outside your frame at steep angles, particularly when the sun is off to one side, creates veiling flare that flattens contrast and gives the image a dull, milky quality. You might not even register it as flare. You just notice the photo looks a bit flat.

The hood solves this. It costs nothing extra if your lens came with one, and it takes a second to attach. The secondary benefit is that it physically protects the front element from rain, dust, and the occasional bump. There is genuinely no downside to having it on.

One small note: if something solid like a bit of debris finds its way into the hood itself, it can actually make flare worse rather than better. Worth checking if a lens you know well suddenly starts behaving strangely.

The light does not decide how it lands in your frame. You do. That is the part most photographers forget.

The relationship between your light source and the edges of your frame matters far more than most photographers appreciate. Many lenses have a specific position at which flare suddenly gets worse: a particular corner, a specific offset from centre.

Shift your composition by a fraction and the flare either disappears or doubles. The lens is not behaving randomly. There is a physical geometry at work inside the barrel.

This is worth experimenting with rather than accepting a flare-heavy composition as fixed. A small change in your shooting position, or a slight shift in where the sun sits within the frame, can make a substantial difference. You are not always able to recompose, but when you are, it is worth the extra moment to try.

Travelling with a camera teaches you that the best light is rarely convenient and the best shots rarely forgiving.