Ah, shooting into the sun. How I love you. (Eller? He’s pretty indifferent about the whole thing.)

And flare! Hello! I love you even more.

It used to be that I could only get flare when I didn’t mean to, till I noticed a few commonalities (and practiced practiced practiced).

For starters, you need to shoot toward the sun. (The obvious first step.)

Second, it helps if the sun is close to the horizon. (Early morning and late afternoon/early evening are ideal.) Third — and this one is a trick that goes against what you’d think — is to shoot with a narrow aperture (so a larger f stop number). When you shoot wide open (for example the lens I used here opens to f/1.4) you let in too much light. And instead of getting flare, you get just blow everything out.

In these shots I stopped up a bit — to 2.8 or 3.2 — so that I wasn’t letting in as much light. But depending on your subject, where the sun is etc., you could even stop up even more. Just play.

The next stop in getting really warm, delicious light flare photos come with your post processing.

This image below, for instance, is straight out of camera.

To get it where I wanted it, I first adjusted the White Balance to daylight and then upped the blacks. (Upping the blacks helps give it that richer, deeper look — notice how the SOOC is kind of flat? Upping the blacks helps with making it look less flat.)

I upped the clarity, vibrance and saturation and also went to the individual hue/saturation sliders, and made the yellow more green and saturated just the reds. (And obviously I cropped this one.)

Now go have some fun with flare! And please ask if you have any questions!

(These photos were all shot in RAW and edited in Lightroom.)

(F Stop Fridays is my new weekly photography-related update. Questions about cameras? Post-processing? Style? Post them in the comments or e-mail me, and then look for future photography-related posts on Fridays!)

One of the most discussed topics on photography forums, it seems, is “what lenses do you use?” and “what should I buy next?” It’s something we photographers like to discuss a lot, and there is always some lens that we’re drooling for. Ask any photographer, and they’ll tell you about at least one piece of glass that they can’t wait to get their hands on. (I have a list of about five!)

But for now, I have three lenses (all Canon) that I use on a regular basis. I’m a primes photographer, which means I prefer to used fixed focal length lenses. (As opposed to zooms, which have a focal length range, like the popular 24-70L.) I shoot with a 35mm f/2, a 50mm f/1.4 and a 85mm f/1.8. As a general rule, primes are faster (meaning they have wider apertures, or F stops), so they perform better in low light. (Which is key when you do a lot of shooting indoors.) They also tend to be sharper than zooms, and produce more pleasing bokeh. (And aren’t we all after that delicious bokeh?)

My primary body is a full frame body — the 5D — which means that a 35mm is truly 35mm. A crop sensor body — like a Rebel or a 50D — changes the focal length. So the 35mm on my Rebel is more like a 50mm, because the crop ratio on a Rebel is 1.6x. (This took me a while to figure out!) So the 35 is like a 50 and the 50 is like an 85.  Just something to keep in mind when researching lenses — whether you are shooting full frame or crop sensor.

The 35mm is great for tight indoor situations, when I need to pull back more.

It’s also fun when I want the angle to be a little wider. Sometimes there can be some distortion, but with dogs, for example, a little distortion can be fun:

I recently upgraded from the 50mm 1.8 to the 50mm 1.4. The 1.8 is a FANTASTIC starter lens. It’s less than $100, and it is a terrific little workhorse of a lens. I have hundreds of images in my Flickr stream taken with the 1.8, but I thought it was time to upgrade a little. The 1.4 has a bit of a learning curve (the depth of field is narrower wide open, because it’s 1/3 stop wider, so you can to watch your focus), but I’m loving it. Some recent images with the 1.4 …

But my favorite lens is probably my 85mm 1.8. It is just perfect for outdoor portraits, and the bokeh is so beautiful. You really can’t beat it for outdoor portraits, and it also performs well indoors assuming you have the space to back up enough.