Sunstar through Black Oak

Posted by Don Smith (California, United States) on 7 November 2008 in Landscape & Rural.

Yosemite's El Capitan Meadow was alive with fall color on a recent fall afternoon, thus I decided to play with this backlit oak by creating a sunstar. On clear, blue-sky fall days, the best time for me to shoot fall color is either early or late in the day when the color is lit by indirect light. Once the sun is up, my only other option is backlight. I created the sunstar by placing the sun along the hard edge of the tree's trunk and stopping down to f/16. This image is a combination of 7 exposures starting at 1/125th and finishing at 1/2 second. These images were combined using Photomatix Pro 3.1 software's Batch Processing. I then tonemapped the resulting file at the program's default settings. Next, I re-opened the image in Adobe Camera Raw via Bridge, made some global corrections with Curves, then opened it into Photoshop CS3. I was able to clone some flare and darken the wall of granite in the background to enhance contrast using Nik's Viveza software. Finally, I sharpened the finished image using Nik Sharpener Pro software. I teach all of these image optimizing methods in my workshops. To learn more about my workshops, please visit my website at http://www.donsmithphotography.com.

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