Photgraphing a solar eclipse?

[ShaneS]

Hawaii will be the only state in the US to see a solar eclipse on Thursday. I hope to be able to sneak a break from work to capture an image or two and am looking for some hints/tips.

My longest lens is only 200mm.

Thanks in advance.

Link to details for others in Hawaii: Hawaii Eclipse

Edit: Apologies for the typo in the thread title

[muralimithun]

Hi Shane,

It is really exciting to capture the moments of the solar eclipse,Below are my experience and the tips

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1. Firstly Use a proper solar filter: Never look at the sun with your naked eyes, or binocular or camera viewfinder without a safe solar filter. Failure to do so can result in serious eye injury or blindness (photographic polarizing or neutral-density (ND) filters are not safe for use on the sun), If suppose You don't have a solar filter I suggest You to use 'Live view finder' in Your Camera for taking pics.

2.As You mentioned You have 200mm, I suggest You to rent out for a day lens with a focal length of 400MM: This helps to get detailed, close-up shots of the eclipse. This will give you a reasonably large image of the sun's disk in the frame.

3.Use a sturdy tripod or mount: Make sure your tripod and head are strong and stable enough to support your camera gear. Keep your setup as portable, light and easy to assemble as possible in case you need to relocate in a hurry to escape clouds.

4.Set the camera to its highest resolution: To record as much detail use your camera's highest-quality (least-compressed) JPEG setting or image formats, such as TIFF or RAW.

5.Switch to manual: Set your camera to "manual" (M) so you'll be able to control its Aperture,Shutter,focus as well as exposure and white-balance settings.

6.Exposure: It's a challenge to determine the correct exposure beforehand, so shoot the sun before the eclipse at various shutter speeds to check out the correct exposure and Be sure to try out your actual setup before the eclipse. This will reveal any potential problems with focusing and vibrations, as well as internal reflections or vignetting in the optics. Take some test shots.

7.Lastly Planning and Timing:

A common problem encountered by eclipse photographers is to either forget to look or miss a great photo opportunity. Due to the relatively short time in which you have to photograph the eclipse it is not uncommon to loose track. Before the eclipse everything seems to move in slow motion as you await totality. You should try to plan ahead and then have some way to keep track of your timing.

Hope the above piece of information helps You!!

Cheers!!!
Murali Mithun.

[ShaneS]

Thank you for the tips Murali. I'm not sure I can get a great vantage point when I sneak out of work but I will see what I can do (if I can sneak away for a bit)

[muralimithun]

Your Welcome Shane, Hope You get a Great vantage point to shoot.

Happy Clicking

[jcuknz]

I can only relate how I in complete ignorance of how to do it but with strong memories of a staff cameraman being off work for two weeks following his filming of an eclipse. I happen to have an Infra Red filter which passes no visible light. However as I found the sun is emitting much more than just visible light. A freind interested in astronomy compared my result with that in the paper where their photographer had taken a shot of the projected image at our observatory ... there was quite a few differences with both our shots being taken within minutes of each other due to the different light source.
Even recording no visible light only that around 720mu it was plenty for AE to 'hick-up' before showing me an image, bright but not unbearable in the Electronic Viewfinder as I selected the sun with full zoom or 280mm Angle of View with my Nikon 5700.
I can see little difference between the shot at 1/150 f/5.9 [which shows cloud beside the sun ] and white disc at 1/3571 at f/7.4 .... so considerable filtration is needed to show detail ...I used the curves tool with the bottom of the line at about 7/8th to get this result showing the sunspots visible by IR light.
24 November 2003

And just for fun, influenced by a John Hart photo I saw recently, I did this using material from my shots.

Enjoy I hope