![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My Eclipse Day
Aug. 21st, 2017 06:55 pmWe didn't head north to see the eclipse, circumstances and money just didn't work out, thus my wife swapped with a co-worker to cover part of his shift: she is an operator on the Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot, the National Solar Observatory, he works on my wife's 3.5 meter. Thus, he is a Vampire and she is a Day Walker. My wife slept through the event, I drove over to Sunspot and participated.
Right off the bat, I didn't do enough prep work. My biggest mistake was not ordering a filter for my camera well in advance of the event! Oh, well. On top of that, I didn't get my photo gear together yesterday, and in getting it together this morning as I was getting ready to leave, I found that my tripod head was missing! My second head has been missing for some time, so my primary tripod was out of commission. Fortunately I also have a travel tripod, so my experiment was able to proceed.
The second mistake that I made was failing to grab a new memory card. When we were in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, I took my Canon SL1 in to Tempe Camera Repair, a fantastic repair shop that I've used for over 30 years, to get the sensor cleaned. In doing so I removed the strap, tripod head, and memory card. I put all three parts in the camera bag and somehow a black hole formed and only the strap survived. Fortunately I found another 32 gig SD card, unfortunately I left it sitting on the dining table. So I only had my Lumix and my 6D for shooting with.
The experiment was thus, and probably a failure: in a forest area, such as where I live, an eclipse through tree leaves can have the same effect as a pinhole and you can see it that way. Sounded pretty neat to me, so I set up my 6D with the interval timer firing every 15 seconds from when the eclipse began until it ended. I'm later going to suck the images in to iMovie and see what I've got. I just finished unloading and categorizing the photos from the two memory cards, and thought I'd post three photos of the eclipse which are mildly nifty.
These were all taken in a rather unconventional manner: holding the lens of the safety glasses in front of my hand-held Lumix LX7. I was experimenting with exposure and only got one image of the moon eating the sun, so I was content.
One of the awesome features of my Lumix is that you can adjust the aspect ratio of the photographs! I set it to 1:1 for some photos, such as the first. For the second photo, I cropped it in Photoshop to 1:1, otherwise none of the images were adjusted in Photoshop.
The weather was not good. We had lots of thick clouds, and I thought: clouds are diffusers! I can directly shoot the sun through clouds! And thus, the first image, taken at 10:56 MST:
This second shot is the actual moon eating the sun: (11:49:18 MST)
And finally, the dramatic fiery ball shot: (11:49:40 MST)
Right off the bat, I didn't do enough prep work. My biggest mistake was not ordering a filter for my camera well in advance of the event! Oh, well. On top of that, I didn't get my photo gear together yesterday, and in getting it together this morning as I was getting ready to leave, I found that my tripod head was missing! My second head has been missing for some time, so my primary tripod was out of commission. Fortunately I also have a travel tripod, so my experiment was able to proceed.
The second mistake that I made was failing to grab a new memory card. When we were in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, I took my Canon SL1 in to Tempe Camera Repair, a fantastic repair shop that I've used for over 30 years, to get the sensor cleaned. In doing so I removed the strap, tripod head, and memory card. I put all three parts in the camera bag and somehow a black hole formed and only the strap survived. Fortunately I found another 32 gig SD card, unfortunately I left it sitting on the dining table. So I only had my Lumix and my 6D for shooting with.
The experiment was thus, and probably a failure: in a forest area, such as where I live, an eclipse through tree leaves can have the same effect as a pinhole and you can see it that way. Sounded pretty neat to me, so I set up my 6D with the interval timer firing every 15 seconds from when the eclipse began until it ended. I'm later going to suck the images in to iMovie and see what I've got. I just finished unloading and categorizing the photos from the two memory cards, and thought I'd post three photos of the eclipse which are mildly nifty.
These were all taken in a rather unconventional manner: holding the lens of the safety glasses in front of my hand-held Lumix LX7. I was experimenting with exposure and only got one image of the moon eating the sun, so I was content.
One of the awesome features of my Lumix is that you can adjust the aspect ratio of the photographs! I set it to 1:1 for some photos, such as the first. For the second photo, I cropped it in Photoshop to 1:1, otherwise none of the images were adjusted in Photoshop.
The weather was not good. We had lots of thick clouds, and I thought: clouds are diffusers! I can directly shoot the sun through clouds! And thus, the first image, taken at 10:56 MST:
This second shot is the actual moon eating the sun: (11:49:18 MST)
And finally, the dramatic fiery ball shot: (11:49:40 MST)
