A few days ago, I saw this beautiful photo from one of my Flickr contacts, Groucho Dis:
[
]Twinkings stars outside Spaceship Earth (Explored!) | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
and ever since then, I've been wondering how to create those little lightbursts. I'm aware that he has a nice DSLR while I just have a Canon Powershot SD790 (a point-and-shoot) and that he also used a fisheye lens, but even after experimenting with different long-exposure settings I just can't seem to create the spokes on the lights.
Or- was this added in processing? If so, could you be so kind as to share with me how to do this? I have GIMP, but even if you can't tell me exactly how to do it I would be happy with even the name of the processing type.
Thank you so much everyone!
Your help is greatly appreciated.
I just happened to stumble across this while doing some Googling... yes, that's my photo, and I'm really glad that you liked it! There is another version that I took almost two years earlier here, but with a portrait orientation:
Epcot's sparkling sidewalks | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Yes, the photo was taken with a fisheye lens - the Pentax fisheye zoom, as was pointed out by Derrel. I generally don't like the look of a "normal" rectilinear UWA lens, and the few times where I want that look, I can "de-fish" the fisheye photo for extremely wide-angle shots.
You really can't use any filters with a fisheye lens, and certainly not a cross-screen filter, since the front of the lens is curved so much and the field of view is so wide that it'd be impossible to not have the filter itself visible. The only fisheye filters I am aware of are ones that go behind the lens, for filtering colors. My full-frame Zenitar fisheye has these.
The starbursts are caused by stopping down the lens, which is a fancy way of saying that you make the aperture (the hole that the light passes through in the lens) small. This shot was F13, which is a pretty small aperture. The bursts are caused by (as I understand it) internal reflections from the corners where the individual aperture blades meet. The more blades, the more bursts you get. You actually get twice the number of bursts as you have blades. The Pentax fisheye zoom has six aperture blades, so you get twelve starbursts - it just happens that they overlap each other, so you only see six. The other shot, which I linked to above, was shot at F10 and you can see a little more separation between the bursts.
Now, if you want to get really spectacular, you have a lens with an odd number of aperture blades, so they don't overlap. Many high-end lenses have nine blades, which gives you an 18-point starburst around bright lights. My dream lens is the Pentax fisheye zoom with nine blades, watersealing, and maybe a little better control over purple fringing (a common problem for very wide lenses.)
Replicating the effect in a point-and-shoot may be tricky but not impossible with a point-n-shoot. You need to make sure that you have a mode where you can control the aperture, or F-stop... usually "aperture priority" but the naming may be different on a PnS. Set it to a high number (small opening) and get a shot of a light that is much brighter than the rest of the photo and see what you can come up with. These are easiest shot at night, for obvious reasons. You also may want a tripod, as the smaller aperture means that you'll need a longer shutter speed to get the exposure that you want. My photos in question were shot with a little Gorillapod SLR, which is handy when I'm not up for carrying around my full-size tripod!
Thanks again for the kind words, and feel free to message me on Flickr or reply in this thread if you have any other questions. Thanks!
- Now I need to know, haha - I'm going to try and ask the photographer!
