Equipment Destroyed or Damaged Shooting the Eclipse

Here's a link to the story:

https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/0 ... e-of-2017/

Joe

Very interesting, Joe. Nothing like melting your sensor or your lens iris.

Fun video. Remember setting paper & dried grasses on fire with a magnifying glass as a kid? I almost said "doh" when he showed a 600mm lens pointed at the sun for a demonstration of what that would do to a "throw away" camera body.

I wonder how happy that guy is with his new $10K 600mm lens with the fried diaphragm that he now owns. Oh well, it makes a good doorstop.

I had five cameras going at once during the eclipse and that was too much for one person to attend to.  Two of them were capturing background video so that wasn't a problem, but the other three were all pointed at the Sun.  One setup had my D7200 and Sigma 150-600 sport on a Wimberly mount and I had the Panasonic G85, shooting 4K video, piggy-backed so both were looking at the same thing.  The other camera shooting the Sun was a D800E with 300mm f/4 on a separate tripod.  Neither setup was actually pointed at the Sun until just a few seconds before totality and both were turned away a few seconds after totality.  

This first video was the G85 shooting the eclipse and you can hear the D7200 running off the intervalometer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YNr19TWNMo

The second video was background of the crowd using one of my D800E's -- you can see it go dark then recover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpYeLzlQHaw

I made many mistakes doing this and looking back using five cameras was biting off more than I could chew.  One of the other cameras I used, a Panasonic GH2 shooting HD video of the background mountains, I left in AF mode and as soon as it started to get dark it started focus hunting.  I was hoping to see the shadow sweep over the area, but I think I'd need some significant elevation for that and besides, there was a good deal of smoke from wildfires -- you can see the haze in the second video.

My location was dead center on the line of totality at a spot about 39 miles NW of Arco Idaho along US93.


Brian