ON LOCATION SHOOT FOR THE STARS
Discover how to capture spiky sunstars with your Canon EOS
01 SUNNY DAY
You’ll need a sunny day to capture clear starbursts. Haze or clouds around the sun can make things more difficult. Don’t look directly at the sun through the lens – instead engage Live View. Don’t worry about the sun damaging your sensor, this only tends to happen with longer lenses and wider apertures.
02 TRIPOD
We need a tripod to take a series of frames in alignment. But even if you just want to capture starbursts without using the frame blending technique described here, a tripod is still a good idea because the narrow aperture required for creating starbursts often means that a slower shutter speed is necessary.
03 STARBURST SETTINGS
Start by shooting a frame for the starburst. Set your Canon camera to aperture priority and set the ISO to 100. Dial the aperture to its narrowest setting, like f/22 or more. Focus on the foreground, take a shot and check that the starburst effect is working. If not, try shifting your position slightly.
04 CAPTURE FINE DETAIL
After shooting for the starburst, lower your aperture to f/8 and take a second shot. By using a lower aperture, we can guard against the diffraction that simultaneously gives us that nice sunburst but causes the rest of the details in the scene to go slightly soft. This technique gives us the best of both worlds!
05 SHOOT FOR A FOCUS STACK
A wider aperture of f/8 frame will result in sharper details but less depth of field. In scenes where you have close-up details and distant scenery, this can be an issue, as the whole scene may not be in-focus. We took two frames at f/8, one focused on the closest tree, the other on the distant tree. We can focus stack these later.
06 MAKE THE SUN SMALLER
The sun is a small point of light (okay it’s unimaginably huge, but it’s small in relation to the sky), but often we need to make the point of light even smaller to get crisp sunbursts. We do this by partially obscuring it, using a building or a tree branch so we can only see a half or quarter of the glowing circle.