Strange blue patches on my photos

[yarga]

I just bought myself a nikon d50, the day after I took it with me kitesurfing at christchurch, uk. On two of my pics there were strange blue dots (below), what causes them? Is it the sun or UV? Will any filters stop this from happening? It's only been on two photos.
http://www.oracletrading.co.uk/DSC_0096.jpg
http://www.oracletrading.co.uk/DSC_0097.jpg
Thanks

[cwphoto]

Gees, what a spoiler!:(

Doesn't look like dust. Maybe some sort of flare as I notice you are pointing into the sun.

Did you use a filter?

[yarga]

No I used no filter, I thought it was something to do with the sun too. Do you think some sort of filter would hav helped?

[coldrain]

You are familiar to sun flares in photos? No idea what lens you are using, but your lens is very suseptible to flaring. The waves reflect so much light from the sun that they start to act as little suns, making all these flares pop up.

Only 2 things would help, a better lens which handles sun flaring better, and the clone tool in photoshop or other photo editting package and a lot of patience.

[yarga]

Thanks coldrain,
I was using the D50 kit lens, I will get a better lens one day, perhaps sooner then I thought. I'm not goning to clone the flares out as these are only pics I took on my first day with the camera.

[TenD]

Thats really weird looking, my initial reaction is flare, and the strange pattern is caused by multiple "suns" reflected off of the water, like coldie says. I think the strangeness of it warrants more experimentation, though. See if you can duplicate the effect. See if you can borrow another lens and compare it to the lens you have.

[Vich]

Wow,

My very first thought was "hot pixels" due to the color and patter seems approximately the same on both. However the pattern is very slightly different on the second which would rule that out. They seem to be in the shade mostly. Flare seems the only other possibility, but I can honestly say I've never seen flare like that (not that I'm vastly experienced).

A good multicoated UV filter can help with flare, although it may cost nearly as much as the lens (I'm guessing 18-55 kit lens). And it only helps.

As Coldy said, a better lens would help although all lenses are subject to a certian amount of flare when there's that kind of sun reflection.

A polarizer would also help.

[yarga]

Thanks again for your help, If I get the chance I will try and experiment more with this 'flaring' effect. This will also give me an excuse to buy some filters:). May not happen for a while as the bright sunny days which made this effect are not too common in England. I am going to play with photoshop and move the blue splodges arround the photo to see if they correspond to the sun reflections on the water. Unfortunately I only have the kit lens to play with atm, Im tempted to go for a sigma 18-200mm or a sigma 70-300mm apo soon but I don't have the money yet:(

[yarga]

Well that was a stupid idea, a lot harder than I thought to match the flares up. Anyway wouldn't the cause of the flare be off the photo?