Capturing the sun

The reconstructed “ghost” structure with partial walls and windows of the building known in the eighteenth-century as 190 High Street is officially titled, “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” (2010).

The open-air President’s House installation in Independence National Historical Park was designed to give visitors a sense of the house where the first two presidents of the United States, George Washington and John Adams, served their terms of office.

The commemorative site designed by Emanuel Kelly, with Kelly/Maiello Architects, pays homage to nine enslaved people of African descent who were part of the Washington household with videos scripted by Lorene Cary and directed by Louis Massiah.

Just like the Rocky statue I photographed last week in anticipation of this week’s news, the President’s House was in the news last year so it remains on my radar as I walk around Old City (our newsroom is right across the street).

The cloud formation in the winter sky was what first caught my attention. Then it was seeing the sun lined up directly behind the triangular pediment above the Georgian home’s “front door.”

I played with “placement” of the sun peeking through a tiny gap at a bottom corner of the gable. I knew knew that f/22 on my mirrorless camera’s lens would give me a nice starburst. It’s an optical effect that happens because the lens’ aperture blades don’t form a perfect circle. And the narrower the opening — like f/22 — the more pronounced the effect (shooting at f/2.8 is not quite as dramatic).

Then it was simply a matter of my moving my head ever-so-slightly to align the sun with the little hole — like threading a needle.

While standing in the thin shadow of the door, I was getting blasted in the eye each time I moved. Then a group of tourists, or a noise, startled a flock of pigeons and as they took flight I was not poised just right, but I liked having the birds there better than a perfect placement of the starburst.

I tried a similar “trick” a few years ago, when walking around my town photographing with my iPhone. It doesn’t have a mechanical diaphragm so the effect is not the same. Plus, the threading-the-needle part is much more difficult when you are not actually looking through the lens as in a DSLR. And with a backlight sun blasting you directly in the face.

The optical principle of refraction through a lens diaphragm is the same for both mirrorless and DSLR cameras because light travels through the lens elements and aperture in the same way.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: