The Great American Eclipse: Re-Edit

This August 2017 shoot was one of the most challenging but rewarding of my life. The eclipse was entirely weather dependent. I shot this in a very rural part of IL – near the Ohio River – among throngs of other spectators and onlookers. There were some many people around that it almost broke southern Illinois’ infrastructure. Places were running out of food, rest stops and bathrooms were overfull. A normal five hour drive took fourteen.

That all being said, I’ll never forget when the moon snapped into place over the face of the sun and turned into an onyx orb pulsing in the sky. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was spiritual. No photograph I’ve seen does it justice. Yet, I as did many others, tried. Everything we’ve shot is just a pale copy, but even a copy is still a thing of beauty.

From a technical perspective, this was one of my most challenging shoots. I had to highly specialize my camera rig and push it to the limits to get this shot. A telescope rig would have been better, but without having a good telescope, here’s how I pulled it off:

3 bracketed +/-1 exposure photos, stacked – Nikon d7200 – effective focal length 1500mm – Tamron 200-500mm 5.6 zoom lens shoot at 500mm – Vivitar 2x magnifier – dx 1.5 crop sensor

The major drawback of that rig with the vivitar 2x magnifier. It essentially set my minimum f-stop to 13. I would have preferred a much lower f-stop where I could have bracketed on shutter speed. I actually shot +/-2 exposure, but the +2 started seeing motion blur which rendered the higher exposure end of my bracket kind of useless. Also, I don’t have a gyroscopic mount, so I constant had to shift the frame. What can I say – I usually shoot star trails rather than telescopic space objects. My equipment’s all calibrated for wide angle.

I think I did good for a thrown together rig. I can’t wait till to give the next eclipse on 2024 another attempt.