The phenomenon you see illustrated here, with points of light radiating out from a bright center, is one of my favorite photography tricks to pull off. Though it’s not actually a trick at all, just a matter of understanding some fundamentals of how pictures are captured by cameras and the importance of exercising control over exposure. Also, you can’t get this kind of shot with a phone so it’s kind of a fun, if perhaps slightly vain, flex for anyone who shoots with a dedicated camera and knows what they are doing. But more than all that, this picture is among my favorites from our entire trip to the Black Hills and Badlands over the summer, which is why it most certainly deserves a spot here on Weekly Fifty.
I shot this with my Fuji X100F at f/16, 1/80 second, ISO 1250, and while that ISO is a bit higher than I normally use with that camera it was a tradeoff I was more than happy to make here. Usually my primary consideration when taking pictures is aperture because I like to control the depth of field, but here it was aperture for a different reason entirely. My choice here had nothing to do with depth of field and everything to do with the beams of light: You can only get a starburst like this if you shoot with a small aperture, since the light bouncing off the physical blades is what produces the desired effect. It’s also why you can’t do this on a mobile phone–they all* have fixed-aperture lenses.
You also can’t get a shot like this unless the bright point of light is just that: a point. When the sun is out and about during the day it’s just too large and bright to produce starbursts, which is why you can only get these if you compose your shot so that the sun is almost entirely obscured behind a tree, building, mountain, or other such object. So basically, conditions have to be just right to get a picture like this, and I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to be able to capture this image at such an incredible place as the Badlands. While our road trip was not over, our time in the park was, and the next day we left the park to continue on to more sights while also making our way back home.
Looking at this picture reminds me of not just the incredible scenery, but the time spent with my wife and kids over the course of the ten days we were on the trip, and that says quite a lot about the real magic of photography.
*To be fair, there are a few models that use variable-aperture lenses but they are by far the minority. All phones from major manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Google, etc. have fixed-aperture lenses.
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