Shooting into the Sun

82mm | 1/160s | f/25 | ISO 200

According to Miguel, this is one of my "go-to" kind of shots, shooting into the sun.  Well he may be right, because my walk this evening with the intention of shooting macro quickly turned into Sunbursts.





I put my Mom's Sigma 28-80mm on my camera to see how it works.  It has a 1:2 macro, only at 80mm when the "Macro" switch is selected.  The focus motor will sometimes get stuck and make a lot of noise/vibration when it hits the focus limit when not in Macro mode.  But while locked at 80mm in Macro mode it performs almost flawlessly.  So I began my walk with essentially a Sigma 82mm f/6-32 1:2 Macro.  (For some reason the Metadata says these were shot at 82mm.  I need to look into why).

Here is what I consider the best Macro shot of the day.  Not really that special, the sun was low and there were lots of shadows.  I was impressed how shallow the depth of field could be at f/6.

82mm | 1/100s | f/6 | ISO 200

After losing inspiration for Macro shots, I turned to the sunset.  Shooting into the sun provides its own set of challenges.  

Sunburst

The "rule" to make a sunburst/starburst is the stop down the aperture to the smallest available (highest f-stop number).  On most of the lenses I use (Sigma f/2.8), the minimum aperture is f/22.  So I set the aperture to ~f/22 and shot the into the sun.  It wasn't until I got back that I realized I could go to f/32.

80mm | 1/200s | f/25 | ISO 100

I took a few other similar shots with the bushes in front of the sun, changing the composition and trying an HDR (which I haven't merged yet and I don't expect it to turn out well).  After looking at my keepers, I've noticed something interesting about the aperture.  I was lowering the aperture to get more light as the sun was setting, but I continued to get decent starbursts from the sun.  See the two images below along with the one above.

82mm | 1/160s | f/18 | ISO 100

82mm | 1/25s | f/11 | ISO 100

I'll have to experiment with this further one day.  Somewhere in my catalog of photos I have examples of a sun at f/2.8 where there is no starburst at all, but I can't find them now and you'll have to trust me on that one.

Lens Flare

This image just happened by chance, and I am sharing it to remind myself to consciously include lens flare in the future in my images.  The only tip I can give about this is to place the sun just out of frame, but not too close that the image gets washed out.  

82mm | 1/80s | f/6.3 | ISO 100

Summary

• To produce an starburst of the sun when shooting directly into it you need to do the following:
• Stop down the aperture (f/11 or smaller)
• Make sure the sun is not obscured by clouds.  Starbursts only work when the light source is a point source.  Clouds will soften the light and not allow a starburst.
• Overexpose slightly.  The camera in matrix metering (where I'm normally set) tries to expose for the entire scene.  The brightness of the sun can cause the camera to underexpose the scene.  This is kind of a case-by-case thing.
• Lens flare looks cool (see above), and I should try to include it in my images in the future.