Brilliant afternoon sun shines behind Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Utah in November 2002, the first time I photographed it. Note the beautiful 14-point sunstar made by the Minolta DiMage 7i’s seven-bladed aperture.My AF Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 sits on a camera recently.
My friend Jamie and I recently reminisced about my first trip to Utah 15 years ago this month, so I took a look at the trip report, which I rewrote and expanded a few years ago. One thing I noted was how great my travel camera at the time, the Minolta DiMage 7i, did, particularly with its beautiful color rendition and spectacular 14-point sunstars.
Add to that the arrival of the holidays, and it’s a perfect time to revisit sunstars, an excellent tool in our photographic toolbox.
The nine-bladed apertures of many telephoto lenses, like my 200mm f/2.0, stopped down to f/16, create subtle 18-point sunstars.I photographed this Kokopelli-esque cactus at Dog Canyon in southern New Mexico in 2010, with a Fuji camera whose lens had a six-bladed aperture. As you can see, the six-point sunstar tends to fan out the light, and isn’t as pretty as other sunstars. I noticed just last night that the movie “Lone Survivor” was filmed with lenses with six-bladed apertures.
I talked about sunstars a time or two before. They are created by lenses as rays extending outward from bright points of light, and help us express a feeling of brightness and brilliance in a scene. Most lenses produce some kind of sunstars, but some lenses produce better ones than others.
The formula for sunstars is pretty basic: if your lens has even-numbered aperture blades, it will produce that number of sunstar rays (six-bladed apertures make six-pointed sunstars.) If you lens has an odd number of aperture blades, your lens should produce twice that number of sunstar rays (seven-bladed apertures make 14-point sunstars.)
That’s the formula, anyway. In practice, it doesn’t always work our quite that way, and in testing today, I had a couple of surprises.
I grabbed some of my lenses I thought would be good sunstar producers and took them out to our Shumard oak tree. With clear skies and brilliant autumn sunshine, I know I would coax most of them into nice-looking sunstars. Most of these lenses are older AF Nikkor lenses with straight seven-blades apertures.
The AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 has seven straight (not curved) aperture blades, and makes gorgeous, brilliant sunstars.I’ve had the AF Nikkor 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5 since 2005, but seldom used it because of many better options for 24x15mm sensors.
It wasn’t so much a controlled test or a lens shootout, as much as it was me getting a better feel for which lenses I currently own can produce sunstars and to what degree.
All these test images were shot at f/16, a very small aperture, since larger apertures don’t really produce sunstars.
The lack of real aperture blades is also why smartphones produce sunblobs instead of sunstars.
The AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 design dates back to its manual-focus cousin. This lens produces very nice sunstars, evoking a sense of brightness for the viewer.Predictably, my 20-year-old AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8, with its seven straight aperture blades, sets the standard for beautiful sunstars.The disappointment for the day was from my AF 28mm f/2.8 Nikkor, which I got for almost nothing on Ebay a few years ago. With seven straight aperture blades, I expected sunstar performance like the 20mm and the 50mm, but as you can see, it’s a bit lackluster by comparison.I haven’t shot with my AF 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5 for years because I didn’t have 36x24mm sensor, but getting a Nikon D700 recently changed that, and breathed new life into this lens. The sunstar with this lens is quite surprising, since the seven aperture blades are curved, but I have to say I was impressed. If you count, there are 28 rays of light in the sunstar.
It was fun to run in and out of the house with a different lens each time. Hopefully I have conveyed the power of the this effect, one of my favorites.
Part of what attracts me to the sunstar produced by my long-dead Minolta DiMage 7i is the bluish halo in the sunstar, which to me conveys a sense of the brilliance of the light.
1 Comment
I feel like I just won something when you bring out your lenses and measure their possibilities. Thank you.
I feel like I just won something when you bring out your lenses and measure their possibilities. Thank you.