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Nikon D300, Nikkor Ai 200/4

We were thinking of driving north today to catch the ring of fire, but it had been a crazy busy weekend so far so we settled on watching the eclipse 2012 from the comfort of our back yard.

I setup my F6 to shoot a multiple exposure on a single frame of film, trying to catch the eclipse from start to end.  But I wasn't going to put all my eggs in one basket so I shot a number of digital shots with our D300 as well.  Both were on tripods.

I was using live-view mode on the D300 to compose via its LCD screen and take shots.  Then I checked for artifacts, camera movement (some shots were over 1 second long), and exposure via the histogram.

I started using a few neutral density filters and stopping down to f/32, but that result disappointed me.  It was full of artifacts from an extreme overexposure of the sun despite my attempts to reign in the light.

I had purchased a few "safe for eclipse" solar viewing glasses which we were using to observe the eclipse as it happened.  I stuck one in front of my camera (instead of the ND filters) and amazingly it produced better images!

The above is one of my favorites, and I put a few others up in this Flickr set.

Now I just have to wait for my film to come back to see if my multiple exposure worked out.

Written by Bubble Level

Jamie Zucek lives in California and enjoys film and digital photography, collecting and shooting vintage and modern cameras whenever he can.

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