When I was still growing up the adults always used to tell me that you shoot with the sun behind your back. Everytime the family or other groups of people wanted a photo taken they would tell the "photographer" to stand with the sun behind him or her. I don't know for how long I followed their advice but I do know that I no longer do. In fact, I just love shooting into the sun, even when I photograph people.

          Have you thought about featuring the sun? No, I am not talking about the classic image of a huge red sun at sunset taken with a long telephoto lens. How about featuring the sun in landscape photography using landscape lenses rather than very long telephotos. Yes, yes, I know people shoot a lot of landscape photography using those very long lenses; I do as well. Here is our image of today:

What do you think? The sun is a main feature of this image. Because it is a large sun star it impacts a large part of the image. You may notice that even though the sun is featured I still applied last week's recipe of obtaining depth. You have a strong foreground, a middle-ground, and the dunes and the sun in the background.

          Last week I mentioned how to control the size of the middle-ground by moving your camera up or down (height). In this image, there is a lot of space between the log and the background. If I moved the camera lower that space would have been less. I chose this height to shoot from for two reasons. First, if I lowered the camera to cut down on the middle-ground space the branch on the log which points up would have gone into the background and even into the sky. That is something we want to avoid. Second, the rays of the sun star really work well with this empty space. The space is not really empty, the rays fill the space. Everything in this image complement each other.

          I have written a lot about sun stars lately but for those of you who are new, I will just say shortly that a sun star is created when the sun is behind a hard edge (halfway behind it) and you shoot using a small F.Stop.

          Don't be afraid to make the sun the main attraction of the image. Keep safety in mind. Never look into the sun, not even through a DSLR's viewfinder. Doing so will damage your eyes. Mirrorless cameras have no such issues because you are looking at a screen.