Can a camera be prone to flare on its own?

I recently sold a 40D here on this forum. Today, the buyer wrote me an email saying he was experiencing a "glare" whenever he took a shot with excess sunlight. I'm assuming he means flare.

He was shooting with a 50 1.8, and hasn't sent me pictures of the phenomenon.

Is there any way this is caused by a defect in the camera, and not the lens/filter/compositio​n?

I suggested that he take comparison shots with another SLR using the same lens, composition, and settings, and see if he achieves similar flare. I want to be fair, and if it's a problem he is somehow causing I want to help him figure out how to solve this, but it just doesn't make any sense to me that it would be caused by the camera. I used the camera personally for several months and never had any problem with it.

Thanks in advance.

Well, he says he was shooting "with excess sunlight", which presumably means that sunlight was directly striking the surface of the lens. This causes flare, which would be made worse if he was using a UV filter. It can be helped with a lens hood. But it is not a camera defect, just the way the lens handles the light.

Hmmm, I've always heard of "lens flare" but never "body flare". Example photos would help greatly to diagnose what is going on. Good Luck.

What body was he using before? I'm 99.99999999999999901% sure the problem has NOTHING to do with the camera, and everything to do with the lens and/or the shooting conditions.

When I think body flare, I think "flair" as in Jennifer Aniston and her flair in Office Space

The body itself cannot create flare. It may be the sunlight directly hitting the front lens element and/or filter. It may also be a reflection generated by light bouncing off the sensor glass to the rear lens element then back to the sensor. Either way it is not a "defect" in the camera.

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=660853

Sounds like a local sale, call up the guy and talk to him. Did he also buy your 70-200? That lens should handle flare MUCH better than the nifty fifty.

Yeah, I asked him for examples too. Hopefully he sends them tonight.

He says it's actually not flare, but rather looks more like a reflection on the sensor. I don't quite understand from the description, but hopefully the examples he sends me will help me make sense of it.

egordon99 wrote in post #7535889
https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=660853

Sounds like a local sale, call up the guy and talk to him. Did he also buy your 70-200? That lens should handle flare MUCH better than the nifty fifty.

Was local-- we'll meet up tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure my understanding was correct before meeting up with him.

Funny, I asked another friend of mine and his answer was "you know who else made their cameras use pieces of flair?"

fdw wrote in post #7535887
The body itself cannot create flare. It may be the sunlight directly hitting the front lens element and/or filter. It may also be a reflection generated by light bouncing off the sensor glass to the rear lens element then back to the sensor. Either way it is not a "defect" in the camera.

The sentence I made bold seems to fit his description. Is there a name for this phenomenon, or somehow I might search for example pictures of it?

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as body flare, but there's nothing much you can do about it, and these days one body is probably not any more flare-prone than another.

Set your camera to bulb, remove the lens, and open the shutter. Look into the mirror box. You see a black-painted box with a few mechanical protrubances.

The paint is not a "black body" surface. It reflects maybe 1% of the light that strikes it. Remember that the lens casts a circular beam of light into the mirror box, so there is a lot of stray light bouncing around the mirror box that does not form the image. So when the light entering the camera is really, really bright--such as an image that has the sun in the scene--there is a heck of a lot of light entering the camera, and 1% of a heck of a lot of light can mean quite a bit of flare.

In the old days, some mirror boxes were were more or less effectively "flat black" and reflected more or less light that bounced around the mirror box and eventually struck the film as "flare." Sometimes they had mirror and lens linkages that weren't black at all--fairly shiney metal. Some of the better cameras had mirror box walls that were actually flocked, ribbed, or honeycomb-gridded to reduce reflections and capture stray light. Magazine testers used to comment on the effective blackening of a camera's mirror box.

So, yes, a less effectively blackened mirror box can cause more flare than a more effectively blackened mirror box.

RDKirk wrote in post #7537534
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as body flare, but there's nothing much you can do about it, and these days one body is probably not any more flare-prone than another.

Set your camera to bulb, remove the lens, and open the shutter. Look into the mirror box. You see a black-painted box with a few mechanical protrubances.

The paint is not a "black body" surface. It reflects maybe 1% of the light that strikes it. Remember that the lens casts a circular beam of light into the mirror box, so there is a lot of stray light bouncing around the mirror box that does not form the image. So when the light entering the camera is really, really bright--such as an image that has the sun in the scene--there is a heck of a lot of light entering the camera, and 1% of a heck of a lot of light can mean quite a bit of flare.

In the old days, some mirror boxes were were more or less effectively "flat black" and reflected more or less light that bounced around the mirror box and eventually struck the film as "flare." Sometimes they had mirror and lens linkages that weren't black at all--fairly shiney metal. Some of the better cameras had mirror box walls that were actually flocked, ribbed, or honeycomb-gridded to reduce reflections and capture stray light. Magazine testers used to comment on the effective blackening of a camera's mirror box.

So, yes, a less effectively blackened mirror box can cause more flare than a more effectively blackened mirror box.

That's an awesome explanation, but doesn't sound like the problem unless the quality of the light-absorbing paint could rapidly deteriorate (i.e., over a period of weeks) in normal apartment conditions.

Unless... could it?

It shouldn't. I would not count that as a possibility.

Should be really easy to test out, put or make a cheap hood on the lens in question and compare shots with and without the hood. If it goes away, I would have to make the assumption that this is purely lens-related.

Did he describe it as round shaped flare spots we normally associate with lens flare Or was it something more like this guy posted?
https://photography-on-the.net …php?p=6923246&p​ostcount=1