The technical part matters here. I shot with a 20mm prime that has straight aperture blades — which most photographers don't think about until they need them. Straight blades give you clean, geometric light stars when you shoot at high f-stops. Curved blades give you soft, smudged starbursts that look fine but never quite right.
Every bright light in this frame — every work lamp on every boat — has a hand-rendered starburst that comes from the geometry of the lens itself, not from a filter or a Photoshop layer.
The challenge of shooting at a high aperture on a calm winter night is that you're working slow. Long exposures. No motion blur margin. The boats had to stay where they were, the water had to stay glass, and I had to stay completely still while the camera worked through the frame.
A lot of things had to be true at the same time for this photograph to happen. They were. You can see the boat names if you look closely. Most people who buy this print live here. They recognize the boats.
