Welcome to our P52! This project is designed to get you out with your camera once a week in a meaningful way. Each week I will post a prompt for you to consider. The prompts are merely suggestions, and you are free to shoot off topic if you wish. All images posted must be taken by you, be safe for work, and be taken with this project in mind. Please do not post archive photos. For a further discussion of the guidelines, please refer to this thread, and you can find the previous weeks linked there if you missed them. Feel free to join in at any time of the year, and you may go back to missed weeks if you still wish to participate.
Week 41: Sunburst
I hope you all have a sunny week coming up because our theme is Sunbursts. (If you prefer night time shooting, you can use these same techniques with street lights as well, but I will just be discussing using the sun as the light source.)
Sunbursts are a great way to add a lot of visual impact to your images. Not all lenses are easy to take sunburst images, and often the lower quality lenses give you better bursts because they lack the coatings of modern lenses that help reduce flaring. Still, feel free to use whatever lenses you have.
Of course the first ingredient is full sun, so if your weather doesn’t cooperate, feel free to find an alternate theme this week or come back to this at a later date. I did actually shoot a new image last week when I saw we were forecast to have rain and clouds and I’m not particularly happy with my image so I am going to try again this week to capture something more exciting.
Once you have your sun, you will need to find a location where there are trees or buildings to help block just a bit of the sun (you can see above that you can even shoot indoors if the sun is directly out a window. As a general rule, when you shoot straight into the sun you will typically just get a hazy blown out white area. However, if you can find something to partially obscure the sun, you can work to angle the camera so that a brilliant burst will show. I chose this theme for later in the year when the sun is lower in the horizon which will help your cause, so be sure to go out before mid-morning or after mid-afternoon.
The last big thing you will need is to stop down your lens. Shooting wide open also tends to give you just a hazy sun, but when you stop down, typically past f/8, but I will often shoot sunbursts stopped down as far as my lens will go, which will help you get a much more pronounced burst. It will also help you to use the widest lens you have, as wide angle lenses typically give a better burst effect than a telephoto lens. Sunburst quality will change with aperture, so start at f/8 and then try different lower apertures as you practice to see which gives you your desired effect. Sometimes, as the panorama image below shows, you can even get a slight burst with nothing blocking the light, but it is harder to do, and very dependent on your specific lens.
Once you get your main list of ingredients together, you just need some patience and tenacity. Please be mindful that you will be shooting directly into the sun, and do take care to protect your eyes and your camera. Work in small time increments if you must. Don’t worry if you need to use a higher ISO than you typically do if you are shooting into a very shady area with a deeper aperture, but at the same time, don’t worry about trying to protect all the highlights in the sky; shooting into the sun will inherently blow those highlights, and hopefully by blocking some of the sun you can strike a good balance between highlights and shadows.
Week 41: Sunburst
I hope you all have a sunny week coming up because our theme is Sunbursts. (If you prefer night time shooting, you can use these same techniques with street lights as well, but I will just be discussing using the sun as the light source.)
Sunbursts are a great way to add a lot of visual impact to your images. Not all lenses are easy to take sunburst images, and often the lower quality lenses give you better bursts because they lack the coatings of modern lenses that help reduce flaring. Still, feel free to use whatever lenses you have.
Of course the first ingredient is full sun, so if your weather doesn’t cooperate, feel free to find an alternate theme this week or come back to this at a later date. I did actually shoot a new image last week when I saw we were forecast to have rain and clouds and I’m not particularly happy with my image so I am going to try again this week to capture something more exciting.
Once you have your sun, you will need to find a location where there are trees or buildings to help block just a bit of the sun (you can see above that you can even shoot indoors if the sun is directly out a window. As a general rule, when you shoot straight into the sun you will typically just get a hazy blown out white area. However, if you can find something to partially obscure the sun, you can work to angle the camera so that a brilliant burst will show. I chose this theme for later in the year when the sun is lower in the horizon which will help your cause, so be sure to go out before mid-morning or after mid-afternoon.
The last big thing you will need is to stop down your lens. Shooting wide open also tends to give you just a hazy sun, but when you stop down, typically past f/8, but I will often shoot sunbursts stopped down as far as my lens will go, which will help you get a much more pronounced burst. It will also help you to use the widest lens you have, as wide angle lenses typically give a better burst effect than a telephoto lens. Sunburst quality will change with aperture, so start at f/8 and then try different lower apertures as you practice to see which gives you your desired effect. Sometimes, as the panorama image below shows, you can even get a slight burst with nothing blocking the light, but it is harder to do, and very dependent on your specific lens.
Once you get your main list of ingredients together, you just need some patience and tenacity. Please be mindful that you will be shooting directly into the sun, and do take care to protect your eyes and your camera. Work in small time increments if you must. Don’t worry if you need to use a higher ISO than you typically do if you are shooting into a very shady area with a deeper aperture, but at the same time, don’t worry about trying to protect all the highlights in the sky; shooting into the sun will inherently blow those highlights, and hopefully by blocking some of the sun you can strike a good balance between highlights and shadows.
