On the eve of the day of 24 hours of Flickr, I thought I would dispense a little photography wisdom. Recently, I bought a f/1.8 50mm lens, my first ever prime lens, and have fallen in love with it. It’s so wonderful to use in dark situations when you don’t want to use the flash such as concerts, museums, or even night photography where you don’t want the flash to wash out natural light. However, I kept noticing that when I took photos of anything where there were lights in the photos, I would get little “artifacts” around the lights, usually green-tinted. Here’s an example of our dining room lights for reference…

You can notice the green dots above the lights here.

This has been bothering me for a couple months now until I finally figured it out. I keep a UV/Haze filter on the lens all of the time, mostly just as protection to keep the lens from getting damaged. The lights are bouncing off of the lens onto the filter and the filter is reflecting it back into the lens! I felt like a total dunce when I finally figured it out. Duh. So I removed the filter and took the same picture…

Now, the picture is a little darker. I can only assume the sun went under a cloud or something, because I didn’t change any of the exposure settings on the camera and it was set for manual settings, but notice there are no artifacts in the picture! Hooray!

So, the moral of the story is… filters are a wonderful, wonderful thing. They can do some of the work of expensive editing software like Photoshop for you before you even take the picture and they can protect your camera’s lens from dust, fingerprints, and in the event of an impact, save the more expensive lens from damage. Sometimes, however, you just gotta fly without a safety net and take those pictures filter-less, particularly in this case where you’re going to have lots of points of light bouncing all over the place.