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Vilk wrote:
i drop by from time to time, always amazed how people insist on referring to this as "flare" - and on making dozens of intelligent, experienced photographers look like idiots...
granted, some of the confusion may be due to less experienced people posting flare pictures as their "examples" - but the reflection issue is real, i saw it with my own eyes and reproduced it easily. it was not flare
nikon is investigating the reports; they will come up with a solution and make it good. having requested nikon support more than once i have no doubt here. i agree that at this point the talk of a law suit is silly
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Most seem to refer to it as a shadow, or blockage of the flare, that appears as a band across the top if the image. I can induce this with my 750 using 28, 50, and 85mm f1.8 g primes, but not with my 24-120. The conditions required are a precise angle of light.
Experimenting, it seems that to get the shadow, you need to produce an uncontrolled flare. I used a large tree trunk, which took up about 1/3rd of the frame, vertically. I focused on a specific feature in the the bark.
What I found interesting is that when the tree trunk was exposed properly, the target area in focus, the flare was controlled, and no shadow. However, when the tree trunk was blown out in the flare, the shadow was more likely to be present, and the target area appeared to not be in focus, or lacked detail. I found that spot metering yielded better results.
To my non-artistic, non-professional, non-techical mind, the shadow seems to appear in images that are poorly exposed, with uncontrolled flare, and the AF missed. In other words, images that would simply be discarded in real life as user error, except for the curiosity of the shadow in the flare.
I suspect that some, if not a fair amount, of this is caused by lack of technique when shooting back lit subjects, and the light source at a specific angle. From what I can gather reading about this kind of shooting, it takes more planning, and has a higher failure rate, especially if you want to use the all too easily produced flare for artistic effect.
For example, most of the "how to" manuals I have read state that auto AF is easily thrown off in these conditions, and recommend using manual AF. When I look at my "experiments", one common feature is the target being OOF. The metering is also done of the AF point, so I wonder what the camera default to if the AF misses.
Many of the images we have been shown of the shadow also seem to have the subject OOF. I have asked a few posters on other site questions on this, and I have several have said they had no specific target, so don't know of the AF was where that intended. That to me is just shooting snapshots, not planning; not considering the bright overhead sunlight, and how that will effect what the cameras AF locks on to, and meters off of.
Using spot metering is also commonly recommended for this kind of photography. I also found that this worked best in my experiment. I have asked that question as well to some posters, and have found that they either used matrix, or even more telling, in some answers said they only ever use matrix.
I'm not saying there is no issue here that Nikon cannot make better. Perhaps the D750 is more probe to uncontrolled flare due to light bouncing around more inside, at specific angles, than other DSLR's.
But we also may have a lot of user error, as many people read these posts and then go out shooting backlit subjects with little knowledge or experience in that kind of photography. Like I did.
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