Partial Solar Eclipse
We had quite a few friends to traveled to various places on the path of totality to see the main event. We stayed home and took about 1.5 hours off from work to enjoy the partial solar eclipse. I set up my camera with my long lens zoomed out to 600mm and auto-focus turned off. I set the aperture to f/22 and the shutter speed to 1⁄8000 second. I wasn’t about to look through the camera at the sun, so turned on the LED screen to view the sun on that. Even with those settings, the sun was much too bright and I was unable to get even reasonably good photographs, except when light clouds darkened the sky enough. That happened early in the eclipse but by the time this photo was taken, the sky was clear. Even with only this small amount of the sun visible, it’s way too bright to look at unfiltered, even at those extreme camera settings.
By stacking two polarizing filters over the lens and turning them perpendicular to each other, I was able to reduce the light to an acceptable level. With the two filters perfectly perpendicular to one another, however, the image recorded was a deep blue color. By turning one of them ever so slightly the image turned white and that’s how it was set for this photo, taken a few minutes before the maximum solar coverage.