Last Updated on 06/20/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
Flarestick offers another nifty set of tools to add to your creative effects arsenal
Feel like trying out a new creative effect to spice up your work? We’ve found just the right stuff for you. If you’ve always wanted to try lens flare effects, looks like you’ll have lots of fun with Flarestick. With this set of professional lens flare crystals, you won’t have to spend time adding flares in post — you can just get the popular dreamy effect in-camera!
The Flarestick, simply put, are just crystals in different cuts and sizes but especially made with a 20-cm long transparent handle to make it easy to use. You simply use these crystals pretty much the same way as you would a glass prism: place it in front of your camera’s lens. With the handle, you can easily move it around to create your desired blur and light flare effects. Gone are the days of scouring for second-hand crystals, using glass fragments and other reflective objects, and even looking for chandelier pieces just to achieve that dreamy light flare effect.
There are currently four different designs and shapes for the Flarestick: The Fairy’s Favourite, the most popular in the set, has a small tear-drop shape that produces detailed light reflections and is commonly used for beauty film productions. The Pixiedust is a rounder version with more detailed cuts that produces “glamorous” and beautiful glitter effects. The Fat Lady, the biggest of them all, produces bigger flares and a less detailed glitter effect. Lastly, the Magic Wand has a very flat and relatively small glass body, and spreads the flares on a larger area of the frame compared to the other designs. For best results, pair these crystals with flashlights and spot lights and let them work their magic for your photo and video projects!
The Flarestick is the brainchild of Dirk Wojcik, who was involved with a lot of productions first as a camera assistant, then a Director of Photography. In the early 90s, he experimented with many things to place in front of the 2/3″ lens to reduce the “video look” of the Betacam SP. Sellotape, vaseline, nylon stockings, full and empty water glasses, reflective metals, broken glass, chandelier crystals. You name it, he has tried it.
“Many DoPs then had their own set of tools to create partial blurring or reflections in the camera lenses and these guys cared for these tools like they were treasure,” he also shared.
With it, the idea to create professional versions of these homemade tools was born. Today, Wojcik equips photographers, content producers, and production teams with their own arsenal of easy to use Flarestick crystals so they can just “leave their bags of broken glass at home.”
At ââĴ44-55 (approximately $51.15-63.94) each at the Flarestick website, these contraptions aren’t exactly cheap. But if you use a lot of dreamy flares and blurs in your projects and productions, these could be a worthwhile investment. Otherwise, we can’t blame you if you’d rather scour around for chandelier pieces and play around with prisms for now!
Want to give it a try but not quite sure about the stuff you can make with it? To give you some ideas, here’s how you can play with the Flarestick for portraits and even street photos.
Screenshot images from the video by Flarestick
