Used first to emulate photographic apparatus, the lens flare filter, one of the first added to Photoshop, implied a fictional act of photography even in non-representational images. In a matter of months, it became a hallmark of digital graphics. Far from suggesting the presence of a 'real' camera, the repurposed lens flare plug-in emphasised digitality, and simultaneously produced illusions of depth in 2D images. The latter accidental discovery reorganises a temporal signature ('a camera was present') as a spatial one. Such migrations are the bread and butter of the microhistory of media.
