Disclaimer: I'm not the biggest fan of excessive lens flares; I find flares-for-the-sake-of-it sorta gimmicky.
But I do have an upcoming project where the wide horizontal flare/streak (similar to that present in anamorphic lenses) is desired, so I started looking into the various filters available and researched the concept behind them.
At the moment, I don't have any "behind-the-scenes" pictures... just this test image. But there's really nothing much to it. Just a piece of fishing line/filament stretched vertically over the front of the lens.
The filament was held in place by a UV filter attached to the front of the lens. If you want a totally glass-less setup, you can actually remove the glass from the UV filter and use the frame.
My first attempts were with straight X-Acto knife cut/etches in a piece of hard clear plastic (didn't want to waste a bunch of glass UV filters in the process). However, a single etched line didn't flare very well. The best result I got with the etching route was multiple lines running parallel, spaced in even increments. This gave a nice flare all the way across.
But once the filament was tried, I completely abandoned the etching method as there's no worry about low-quality glass on the front of the lens, softening your image.
But I do have an upcoming project where the wide horizontal flare/streak (similar to that present in anamorphic lenses) is desired, so I started looking into the various filters available and researched the concept behind them.
At the moment, I don't have any "behind-the-scenes" pictures... just this test image. But there's really nothing much to it. Just a piece of fishing line/filament stretched vertically over the front of the lens.
The filament was held in place by a UV filter attached to the front of the lens. If you want a totally glass-less setup, you can actually remove the glass from the UV filter and use the frame.
My first attempts were with straight X-Acto knife cut/etches in a piece of hard clear plastic (didn't want to waste a bunch of glass UV filters in the process). However, a single etched line didn't flare very well. The best result I got with the etching route was multiple lines running parallel, spaced in even increments. This gave a nice flare all the way across.
But once the filament was tried, I completely abandoned the etching method as there's no worry about low-quality glass on the front of the lens, softening your image.
