Light Reflections

[GreenleafJason]

When taking pictures at night I have been noticing reflections of the lights in the sky. In the picture below it is very obvious but usually it isn't that bad. Is there a way to reduce or avoid these reflections?

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Jason

[thoughton]

Do you have a UV filter on the lens? If so I'd take it off and try again to see if that is the culprit (i think it is quite likely).

[theantiquetiger]

Other than the reflection in the sky, this is an awesome shot, super great detail!!!

[Marko]

Call me a weido but i think the reflection in the sky makes the shot more mysterious. But I can see why you don't want this regularly, lol. Thoughton's suggestion is a good one indeed, I agree.

[GreenleafJason]

Yes I do have a UV filter on this lens. I didn't even think that that may cause it. I was wondering why my zoom lens didn't have that reflection but that filter is just a clear filter without uv protection. Thank you for the suggestion Thoughton. If I get a chance to test it out this weekend I will post the results.

Thanks,
Jason

[Ron Cardinale]

This is a classic symptom of a filter being used at night. This happens all the time, though, but at night it’s often a lot more prominent. During the day, the real image usually overwhelms the ghost image.
You can minimize or possibly eliminate this by using a filter that has really good antireflection coatings. It doesn't matter that one filter is UV and the other is just clear.

[Iguanasan]

Just take the UV filter off the lens. It's just degrading your images. If you are worried about dropping your lens and breaking it put a lens hood on it.

[thoughton]

This is a classic symptom of a filter being used at night. This happens all the time, though, but at night it’s often a lot more prominent. During the day, the real image usually overwhelms the ghost image.
You can minimize or possibly eliminate this by using a filter that has really good antireflection coatings. It doesn't matter that one filter is UV and the other is just clear.

+1 to this. An expensive multicoated UV filter will reduce this effect, but sometimes it will happen anyway. Hard to predict, and very annoying when it happens. For what it's worth (probably not much :)) I use a Hoya Pro 1 UV filter on my main walkabout lens and I have yet to experience this personally, although when shooting into the sun I have had flare-related problems (receding queues of giant green hexagons) which I believe were exaggerated by the filter (I've been told that it is light reflecting off the front element onto the _back_ of the filter). In rare cases you even get reflections off your camera sensor onto the back of the filter.