Thursday, October 6, 2016

Star Light, Star Bright

Getting that starburst in your pictures - Disney At Night

Test Track is one of my favorites rides at Epcot.  In the queue before you get on the ride, you get to design your own vehicle and then "test" it against other vehicles designed by the other passengers in your ride vehicle.  You get ranked against several criteria including a handling, efficiency and finally performance.  The performance score comes after a thrilling high-speed ride around the test track getting close to 65 MPH.  Be prepared for "bad hair" after the ride.


The location of this picture is at the entrance to the Test Track attraction in Epcot.  To get the starburst effect it generally takes an aperture smaller than f/11.  For this picture, I actually used an aperture of f/22.  With such a small aperture, I needed a shutter speed of 10 seconds.  Given the long shutter speed I also used my mini tripod.  The camera was mounted on the tripod and it sat about 8" off the ground pointing up at the scene.  The focal length was 16mm (1.5x crop).  If you look closely, even the smaller lights have some amount of the starburst effect. 

So this effect is fairly easy to achieve.  Just use a small aperture, f/11 at a minimum, use a tripod, and you should be all set.

Have fun capturing the Magic of Disney!