Needles Starburst
Canyonlands National Park in Southeast Utah is divided into 3 geographically diverse areas: Island in the Sky, The Needles and The Maze.
The image above was shot in the Needles district. This is a region of the park where columns of stone are practically everywhere. In this image, taken about an hour before sunset, the late-afternoon sun is being reflected from the rocks on the other side of a small canyon to camera right. This reflected light is striking the needles in the scene, causing them to practically glow with warm colors. The rocks in the foreground are lit by the cooler blue light of the sky, creating the warm-cool color balance in the image.
The sun can be seen peeking through a hole in the rocks, creating a starburst effect. You can achieve this effect by positioning your camera to catch just a bit of the sun as it appears around a foreground obstruction, and use a small aperture on your lens. For this image, I noticed the sun would be coming down close to a hole in the rocks and I positioned my camera to just catch this event. As I was preparing to take the shot, I kept having to move my camera closer and closer to the rocks to keep moving the sun slightly upwards relative to the hole, so I would be ready just as it made it’s appearance.
This image is made from a single exposure on a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 16-35 mm lens. The exposure was 1/8th of a second at f/22 (the smallest aperture available on this lens) at ISO 100.
By using such a small aperture, I sacrificed a bit of resolution to maximize the starburst effect. On a 21 megapixel image like the Canon 5D Mark II, diffraction effects at apertures smaller than f/16 will cause a detectable loss in resolution. However, I felt it was worth it for this image.