Art - Shooting into the Sun
A spectacular panorama I shot at Kodiak Island, Alaska at about 9:30 pm at night in July!
I see so many beginners go out with their phone or new camera and they shoot directly into the sun! I want to shout, “don’t you know you aren’t suppose to shoot directly into the sun (stupid).” Seeing people post their pictures on instagram and facebook, with shots directly into the sun, it got me thinking. The sun really commands my attention. And, I think I get almost a spiritual experience having the sun directly in the picture!
The panorama above was shot on top of a mountain in Kodiak Island, Alaska at night. You can find this image in the Alaska gallery. Alaska at night in July is a fantastic time to take pictures! So for this picture, one of my favorites, I was in a perfect location for Shooting into the Sun.
13 shots where this one was in the center were used to create the panorama in Lightroom.
I used my Nikon D850 DSLR for taking the 13 shots for the panorama at the top of this page. Above is the center shot that is facing directly into the sun. I was doing all of these shots hand holding and looking at the back screen and not into the view finder…never have your eyes look directly into the sun! I used a 16-35mm wide angle zoom. My focal length was set for 31 mm. The f-stop was 8, ISO was 64, and shutter speed was 1/50 of a second. The challenge for the sun is it is so bright! So you have to do things with the camera to shorten the sensors exposure to the sun and reduce the sensitivity of the sensor by shooting at a low ISO. So, why didn’t I close down the aperture more and increase the shutter speed?
What makes shooting into the sun so difficult is if you decrease the exposure in order to decrease the intensity of the sun (and this is the problem with taking shots of the moon as well) then you loose the foreground and if you try to recover the foreground in post production it is likely it will be too noisy. Since I didn’t want to go through the agony of taking shots at different exposures (and at the time I took these shots there was no such thing as HDR Panorama photo stacking in Lightroom) I tried to find a compromise with my camera settings. I made manual adjustments until the image looked correct on my back screen (sun was artistically acceptable and foreground was visible). I was delighted with getting some star burst pattern even at an f-8 aperture. BUT, do you see the lens flare? Is that bad or good? If you need help identifying the flare, see those small red dots? Notice there are other green and yellow circles in a line leading back to the sun? That is lens flare. Is this a bad thing, flare? It depends…
When all of the photographic images were combined in post production, I had multiple lines of lens flare! I think I was lucky, because for me, the lens flare adds to a surprising artistic element. Sometimes making a picture too perfect doesn’t make it real enough and in my aesthetic, my art I am trying to create with the camera, a sense of being there in the shot is what I am striving for.
This was taken with my GMaster 85mm f-1.4 lens.
I have a color picture of the above image in the Scottsdale gallery. This shot is directly into the sun! Note the equally powerful reflection coming off of the water. In black and white you can really see what is going on. The detail like the hair of some kind coming off the tree trunk on the right, once you notice it, really screams for attention! If you pull your eyes to the background, you realize it is blurred, but done in a way where your brain is filling in the detail. The background isn’t competing for attention from the tree, branches, and leaves. Look again at this picture. The star effect from the sun and the reflection from the water gives a spiritual sense and provides a character to the picture. And if you look again at this picture, something is missing! Where is the lens flare! This is just one example of why the Sony GMaster 85mm prime lens is so extraordinary! I don’t recall ever seeing lens flare in any Ansel Adam’s picture, but I do recall extremely intense reflections of light coming off of water.
In order to get the sun star rays from the sun and from the reflection, I used an f-16 aperture (small opening). I stood close to the minimum focal length for this lens and then moved around a little left and right until I got the sunburst patterns I wanted. Having the sun go through narrow like slots, like branches and leaves, increases the sunburst effect. By the way, the minimal distance a lens can focus is often stamped on a lens. For example on this 85mm lens it says 2.79 ft. So, in a shot like this if you can’t auto focus the camera, you may be standing too close to your subject.
If you watch the video linked to the button above, you will know just from the number of rays in the star burst (there are 18 rays) that the number of blades in the aperture of the GMaster 85mm prime is an odd number and in fact the number of blades is nine 9 (two times the number of rays for an odd number of fans in an aperture).
