It is fun and easy to create sunstar images! The frosted tree branches drew Barbara’s attention. She used a short focal length lens and stopped down to f/16 to produce the sunstar and underexposed the image to darken the sky and make the sunstar more prominent. Nikon D4S, Nikon 14–24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm, ISO 100, f/16, 1/200 second, Sun WB, manual exposure mode and manual focus.
John and Barbara Gerlach dedicate this book to the thousands of photography enthusiasts who have attended our instructional photography workshops, seminars, and exotic photo tours for over thirty-five years. Your enthusiasm, thought-provoking questions, good humor, and friendship have helped us immensely in developing the shooting system we use and teach that lets everyone capture outstanding images without difficulty and consistently.
Writing is incredibly hard work. If I (John) had known I would spend so much of my life writing, I would have paid more attention in the few required writing classes I took in college. If I could do it all over again, I would have omitted my chemistry classes and taken more journalism classes. Several of my clients are excellent writers who volunteered to edit this manuscript—in other words, make sense out of it, which is no easy feat. My deepest gratitude goes to Woodice Fuller, Al Hart for his technical expertise and good humor, and Dave and Kim Stringer. With their help, I feel confident the text is easier to read and the concepts presented here are described in a more logical fashion. Many thanks to all of you! I know this book reads considerably better due to the tremendous effort you have put into helping this accidental author make sense of it all in this book and in previous books.
Special thanks go to Tom Walker, who lives near Alaska’s Denali National Park. His advice about where to go to photograph brown bears, mountain goats, northern lights, prairie chickens, and wintering Japanese wildlife has always been right on. He is a tremendous nature photographer and prolific best-selling author, but he wouldn’t want me to say that, so don’t tell him you heard it here. We know him as “Cowboy” and “Tender Tundra Tom,” but let’s keep that a secret as well.
And most of all, everyone needs to thank Barbara Gerlach, who reads the text to find out where I have gone astray, keeps me on schedule (usually), selects all of the images being used in this book, processes the RAW images with Photoshop, sends these huge files over the Internet to the publisher, and does innumerable office chores that must be done in a timely fashion to get the book to you.