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I live in Houston so I was able to only shoot the partial solar eclipse today. The only good pictures I got were taken handheld with my D 500 with a Nikon 300mm f4 E VR lens. My solar filter was a 6 inch Celestron filter--essentially mylar film.  Fortunately during peak eclipse, there was no cloud cover. Just a bright blue sky. 

My settings were ISO 100, 1/250, f 6.3, Cloudy white balance, all set manually. I tried to focus manually but gave up. I focused with AF on white clouds;  then turned off focusing. I used Live View to help me position the sun on the LCD. Live View did not help me much with obtaining better focus probably due to the extreme lighting conditions. I got a few good pictures this way. 

I tried to use my D 810 with my 500mm lens on my big tripod, but I never could get it to point up to the sky at the right angle. So i switched the filter to a smaller lens on my second camera. 

Plan A did not work. PLan F did.

(I did not do any trial runs.)  

Here's my shot with a 600 on an APS-C camera...  I like the sunspots.  This was at the moment of peak sun coverage in Chandler AZ at 33 13N 111 46W

Great shot EJ.

Any tips on how to get and keep the lens pointing up when mounted on a Wimberley II head? The only thing I thought of was to change the position of one of the tripod legs, but I was concerned about the safety of my camera and lens on my tripod.

When I switched to my D 500, being able to tilt the LCD screen was a huge benefit in being able to see the moon and sun on the LCD. .

Joe

Yup, make one of the tripod legs shorter

E.J. Peiker wrote:Here's my shot with a 600 on an APS-C camera...  I like the sunspots.  This was at the moment of peak sun coverage in Chandler AZ at 33 13N 111 46W

That's the moon, right?

Hey Joe
If you are not already using one, a leveling base below the Wimberley will allow more of an angle. Some leveling bases allow more angle adjustment than others. You may be able to find something like this to mount on top of the tripod. It allows much more flexible positioning.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/ ... _dslr.html

Joe

Did not have any plans to photograph the partial solar eclipse today but someone at work put together a pin-hole camera with an enclosed box.  Pulled out my iPhone.  In 7 years time we get to see the total eclipse here in eastern Ontario.

One person in my group today had a home made pinhole camera. It worked really good.

I live at the western end of Lake Erie. I was at a local county park from around 11:30 TO 3 pm. At no time in the 3 1/2 hours did I witness anything like a eclipse. I was out in the open with my 600 shooting flying Cormorants and White Egrets. At no time did I see a change in my camera settings. Between 2PM and 2:28 PM there was no general darkening. The sun was behind me and was bright all afternoon. I did not have any filters on the lens and I had no special glasses.

I called our local TV station and was told they could see the eclipse. I don't understand how they could see it downtown and 3 miles away there was no evidence of it.

Is it that I had no special filters or glasses. Was it only watchable with glasses and filters? I'm an idiot with things like this. Can someone straighten me out?

Larry

Larry Shuman wrote:I live at the western end of Lake Erie. I was at a local county park from around 11:30 TO 3 pm. At no time in the 3 1/2 hours did I witness anything like a eclipse. I was out in the open with my 600 shooting flying Cormorants and White Egrets. At no time did I see a change in my camera settings. Between 2PM and 2:28 PM there was no general darkening. The sun was behind me and was bright all afternoon. I did not have any filters on the lens and I had no special glasses.

I called our local TV station and was told they could see the eclipse. I don't understand how they could see it downtown and 3 miles away there was no evidence of it.

Is it that I had no special filters or glasses. Was it only watchable with glasses and filters? I'm an idiot with things like this. Can someone straighten me out?

Larry

You need a filter to see the sun. The sun is just too bright (and too far away for your naked eyes to see any difference I think). Where I am it was a 90% eclipse but it looked like nothing happened to the naked eyes or through the camera without a filter. The sunlight should look dimmed though.

I also tried a reverse iPhone photo shooting backwards with the front facing camera.  The sun is just too bright for the iPhone's sensor to expose correctly, so the only image it reproduced in the iPhone photo was one white and very bright blob called the sun   It's like trying to photograph a big spotlight head on.  All you're going to get is one big bright blob. 

However, and I cannot explain the phenomenon, a crescent shaped sun "spot" appeared in all the photos.  I'm sure there is a way to explain why.....maybe a reflection produced inside the camera as light bounces off or....I have no idea.   

The iPhone is an f/2.2 fixed aperture lens with a minimum ISO of 32 (these vary slightly by iPhone model but in that ballpark). Unless you put about a 20 stop filter in front of the lens, you will be in extreme overexposure.

Larry, a partial eclipse is barely noticeable to the naked eye until a very large portion of the sun is covered. I was shooting the eclipse in Oregon and it wasn't till 5 minutes before when the sun was 90+% covered that it got noticeably dim. Where you were should have been 80% +/- eclipsed so would barely get to the range you could notice a change in exposure reading.

A pair of eclipse glasses would allow you to look at the sun and see a thinnish crescent at maximum eclipse.

If you want to read an explanation see this, maybe a bit technical though:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2000JBAA..110..203H

If you wanted to shoot the partially eclipsed sun with a wide angle lens, this is the way you should approach it.

That was with an effective focal length of 18mm so that sun is tiny in this reduced size image. It's obvious at 1:1 in the camera.