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March 09, 2007

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A friend once asked me if I could repair a simple image of an incredible sunset picture he had taken, and asked me how the problem might have happened. Well, I had seen it before myself and was totally clueless, until I gave it a bit more thought. 
But where does that extra reflection of the sun come from?

Well, first of all, it doesn't happen all that often, because we rarely get the sun that close to the center of the shot. Perfectly centered would place the reflection directly over the top of itself. And then with smaller cameras, with smaller and lesser quality lenses, and a sharper curvature of the lens, it's even that much more difficult. 
And I thought it was interesting that the lamp post was in this reflection, and displayed that the reflection is actually flipped and mirrored.

But maybe the following graphic I drew might shed some better "light" on the subject.

So as the light from the sun passes through the lens, it is also reflected off of the inner surface of the glass, bounced back to the other side of the lens, and reflected off of that surface as well. The remaining light is passed back through the lens again onto the surface of the film, CCD, or CMOS of the camera. 
In most cases, as the object (sun) is not as close to the dead center, the reflection is further off and doesn't even reach the surface of the CCD.

These artifacts can easily be brushed out or removed from an image. But sometimes I like to leave them in, as they can also produce an artistic sense that we do live in a real world, filled with real anomalies and interesting technical challenges. 

(Okay, that was just ridiculous, Photoshop the stupid thing out!)

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