Popcorn in the Sky

[Teton Chuck]

Hi Trri, I think Terry nailed it. In Scott Kelby's Digital Photography book he says that you can get a starbright (his word for what I called a sunburst) - "right in-camera by just choosing an f-stop with the highest number you can, like f/22. This alone will usually give you that multi-point star effect ---". Just catch the sun at the edge of the horizon or another object such as a tree like Terry demonstrated with a photo. Try it just for fun, even if you don't have beautiful clouds. Just be careful to avoid aiming at the sun while it is very high in the sky. That is probably not good for your eye or your camera sensor.

Looking forward to hearing how the experiment goes. - Cheers, Chuck

[Teton Chuck]

Terri, here is a photo I took with the intention of getting the largest sunbright that I could. It was shot at 1/60 sec. @ f/25, ISO 100. You can see in this photo that I was being an extremest.

[terrib]

Glad to hear from you Chuck but sorry to see that I missed it completely. So can anyone tell me WHY this works?

[oleleclos]

So can anyone tell me WHY this works?

The sunburst is caused by diffraction, i.e. the bending of light rays as they encounter an obstacle - in this case the aperture.

The reason the sunburst effect gets more pronounced with smaller apertures is that diffraction increases as the aperture decreases. This also affects overall picture sharpness at small f-stops; the effect is just much more pronounced with bright lights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction

[terrib]

Thank you, Ole and Terry and Chuck. I'll give this a try next time and see what happens. Love it when I learn something new - even if I have to show my ignorance publicly to do it.