Happy I got to shoot the partial solar eclipse that covered most of North America this month. Click below to see my setup and a few other shots..
I knew I would need some ND (Neutral Density) to help reduce the intensity of the suns rays. Shooting directly into the sun without some sort of filter would likely burn out the sensor on the camera and/or my retina. I shot using my 70-200mm lens, it would have been nice to have something a little longer, or get a 2x teleconverter, but I made do. Luckily the guys at Sweet Grass Productions had a bunch of ND filters that they let me borrow. I had to stack a 1.2 and a .9 to reduce the sun enough to be able to shoot it. Even with that I was shooting at around 8000th of a second at f.20 and ISO 100.
This was the first decent shot I got. I wanted to find something in the foreground to give the image a bit more context. The gap in these trees worked nicely.
What I really wanted was a plane or a bird to fly by. I knew the silhouette would look pretty sweet against the bright backdrop. I found a spot near where I was shooting where a bunch of birds were sitting on a chimney ledge. I positioned myself and waited ‘till they would fly. It took about 25 mins for them to line up perfectly with the shot.
Another thing that was pretty cool, looking at the sun through the glasses I could see a dark speck on the lower half. At first I though my eyes were tripping out, but someone else said they could see it too. After processing the photos there was the same dark patch. I thought it must be a solar storm, but kinda dismissed it because I thought there’s no way you could see that from earth with the naked eye.. turns out it was a solar storm.. not any solar storm, but the biggest NASA has recorded in over 20 years! Pretty awesome..
There’s a full eclipse happening on March 20th 2015 over the North Sea. I hope I get chance to travel up to Scotland to whiteness part of it.
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