Had a great shoot Saturday night up at Haleakala Volcano. Something I just cannot seem to get enough of is the amazing opportunities to shoot the sun. Something I noticed right off was that when I first set up, the sun was “spiking”. I found this a little irritating because I like to see the round edge of the sun in these types of shots:
1/160, f22, 100 – Canon 5Diii , Canon 24-70 2.8L
No Matter how I recomposed the camera, the sun spikes were still there. Then I remembered that it happens under certain conditions.
Here is what I was going for:
1/4000, 5.6, 100
Why do you think Sun Spikes appear? (Look at the camera settings).
Here are a couple more of my favorites from the day:
Is the slower shutter speed allowing the recorded light to bounce around inside the lens longer?
Could the spiking be caused by diffraction resulting from the small aperture?
I like these pictures a lot! When one wants the twinkling star effect on any kind of light, one needs to push the aperture above f16. An aperture of f22 and f29 will produce amazing star effects on lights because the light needs to enter the camera through a very,very small opening.
You can get the same result with your eyes. During the evening, look at a distant light with the eyes wide open and with your eyes almost closed. Do you see the star effect? Amazing, isn’t it?
Im going to say its the fstop setting. I’ve never had the sun spike in my shots before – nothing intentional on my part – so I think it’s kind of neat to see the look :). Love the shots!
Correct- it seems that the sun spiking is an optical effect of using a smaller sized aperture opening. Once I opened it, this disappeared. I used a faster shutter speed to compensate for it.