From the course: Exploring Photography: Backlighting

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Pointing into the sun to get the "sun star" effect

Pointing into the sun to get the "sun star" effect - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Exploring Photography: Backlighting

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Pointing into the sun to get the "sun star" effect

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- As we've already seen, when you're shooting into the sun, or into any light source, which is what you're doing when you're working with back lighting, you've got the possibility of flare, which can really mess up your image. You've also have something else going on though, which is the option to have your light source cast rays, what are sometimes called sun stars. And that depends on, whether you get them or not, depends on the aperture that you're shooting at. So, I'm going to just frame up a landscape shot real quick here, and I'm going to do this at four, and it's late in the day, the sun is low in the sky. There's no way I'm not getting the sun in the picture. In fact, it's so low it's messing up my auto-focus. There we go, alright, so I take this shot, and I get this, just a big bright ball in the sky. I'm going to iris down from F4 to about F20. Normally, I would not take my aperture that small because there would be such a softening of the image, due to defraction artifacts.…

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