Eclipse 2012

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.