How to create this sun trick ?? The starburst effect…
How to diffract the sun light and create this unique star like style Also called the starburst effect ??
Looking at some pictures I sometimes thought that it was a fake thing that photographers add in post edition process to put a bit in magic in their photography… For me it was almost looking a bit too much…
And I actually changed my mind when I understood the reality of the light diffraction and the trick behind it.
First question as always… What is the story you want to tell, why would you use such an effect… In this cas I was in Harajuku last Sunday and wanted to share the emotion of this golden hour sun highlighting people and things in the street. This light making everything gentle and smooth even in a very crowded environment. Here for me the light, the sun was the subject.
My first shots were at aperture f2.8 and that basically gave the pretty nice story I posted in my blog yesterday here and then I decided to try this magic trick…
Yes it’s coming 😅 let me explain now how you can do that as soon as you just good the good source of light. You simply have to go for very small aperture ( for example f20 here). What will happen is that you will drastically reduce the path in your lens for the light and it will then start to diffract. It would work quite well on any type of light. Here is another example :
A bit more subtle in this case but it also bring a bit of unicité and blinking power to this picture overall quite standard.
Ok i think you want to understand more about it … how can it creat such an effect ?? Everything is link to the shape of the diaphragm in your lens… when you will start to make it smaller it will move from a big open circle to a small polygon shape. And that’s what explain the star shaped streaks radiating from the light source.
In this case I was at f20 but you can see this phenomenon appearing at f11 as well. Obviously the higher you go in number the bigger the effect will be.
Very important to keep in mind that as always in photography it is a matter of balance… if you go to high in f number the quantity of light for your picture will naturally drop and your camera will start to bump the ISO to match your exposure request…. You understand the consequence… your sharpness will drop as well and you will see the devil noise coming ( unless you want this noisy style of course…
Another key parameter to have a very defined starbust effect if also related to the glass quality of your lens. But we had enough for today 😅 and let me keep the lens topic for a next post …
But tell me about you in the comments ? Do you like the starburst effect ? How do you use it in your pictures ??
Let’s talk tech :
We already had quite a good tech talk today but I know you…. If you made it till there it’s because you want to know even more.
So to be back to my previous point there is here a deal to find between the motion blur and the iso knowing that with a f20 my quantity of light will not be huge. My proposal here was to integrate a bit of motion blur that would add a dynamic dimension to the picture ( 1/80s is for sure to slow to freeze a moving subject) and at the same time keep a quite low ISO ( iso 2000 is totally manageable with my R6) to style have a sharp picture…
In a way no magic :) always a balance and some choices to make depending on the story you want to tell.
How would you take such a shot ??