Juan Swartz

I geeked for minute realizing you watched our lame little movie, I almost feel I should apologize for wasting your time, but I'm really grateful you did.

It's surprising the flares from the sun and the street lamps are the same size, but I suppose it makes sense, size/perspective wise they're relatively the same.

If anyone is interested enough it's possible to turn this into a post all about net filter pinwheels/other image effects, posting pics of tulle vs. stocking ect. Though it certainly doesn't seem as helpful as this one , about all the different diffusion filters.

I'm going through a diffuser/Janus Kaminski phase right now and attached two pieces of veil net to the back of my lens for daytime shooting (during daytime I use a Fader ND so I can't attach my Classic Soft) but we ended up shooting at night and I didn't want to take the net off and figured it be a good experiment. There were tons of sources causing flares galore and during shooting I was just thinking the whole movie is ruined because everyone will be distracted by the enormous rainbow pinwheels. Turns out no one noticed, I even pointed it afterward and they said they didn't know what I was talking about. Which is really surprising to me, because even in AI or Minority Report there's never pinwheels this huge and glaring and I notice. So this post I guess isn't so much a question about a problem but an example of how much you can get away with.

Average Night in the Mall Parking Lot

I was afraid the answer would be something like that. Too bad not everything can be fixed with duct tape and hope.

you need to block light out from comming into the back of the filter, as well as utilize eyebrows and side flags for a mattebox to shield the lens as much as you can.

Pro matteboxes have a rubber or foam doughnut on the back of them which is the same size as the front diameter of the lenses you're using (often more than 1 per matte box) to make sure no stray light gets in from behind, and my Arri MB has and eyebrow as well as side flags which inch in and out of position to cut as much stray light as possible. This combined with mattes in the front which accommodate the FoV of certain lenses (e.g. 20-25mm) and block out everything else also help eliminate stray light problems.

Though, truthfully that looks a lot more like LENS flare to me. My Nikon 50mm F1.4 exhibited the same issues when mounted to a digital camera.... film lenses are very well designed and coated to eliminate a good deal of flare...and still lenses often aren't.

Thanks for the quick response. I did a little test to see if it actually is lens flare, and there is some, a faint purple orb, but it's not nearly as intense as the filters. What's the trick with having light sources in front of the lens outside the matte box flags jurisdiction?

I'm using a 4x4 Classic Soft 1

homemade filter holder

Canon 7d, 50mm 1.8

This is my first time using a square filter, and I keep getting hardcore mirror reflections from lights in the scene, obviously there's some way to prevent this because there's practical lights in movies all the time, so how do they solve this issue?

Flares in action