Sunburst

After several cloudy, overcast, or snowy days we finally had a day of cloudless blue sky. Those are not the kind of days you like as a photographer, but I still wanted to get out and see what I could find.

As I was walking through a park late in the day, I saw the sun with a starburst effect behind some trees. I thought there was the potential for an image and started to set up right in the road.

Now that is normally not a safe thing to do but with the temps hovering around 4 degrees I had the whole park to myself. As you can see they do occasionally plow this road but the little amount of snow here was actually all ice and not too many cars had been venturing down this way. So I sat up the tripod and made the image.

I liked the play of light in the tree branches. I liked the cooler light on the road. I liked the sunburst effect. I framed up all three elements in the image and made one just to see what I could get on film.

The part I most wanted was the sunburst. By placing the sun partially behind a tree trunk and stopping down the lens I should get a nice starburst effect on the film. In this case I was stopped down at f/32 but you can get them from f/11 down. You do not see it so much here on the digital snap since I was shooting fairly wide open. I did get it on the film though.