The Story:
I made the almost 900 mile journey from my home in North Carolina to my wife's hometown of Plattsburgh, New York for the eclipse. Plattsburgh was set to have almost 4 minutes of totality. I spent months planning this shot. I assumed (correctly) that most people would be doing the telephoto shot of the eclipse. I knew I wanted something different. I wanted to do a wide angle time lapse but I also wanted to somehow showcase the environment. I spent months using the app photo pills and google maps tracing the line of the eclipse and searching for the perfect spot. I finally settled on the MacDonough Park. The monument there is a very recognizable symbol for the city. From my home in NC it looked like the sun would cross perfectly over the monument but there was no way to be sure until I got there.
When I arrived in Plattsburgh I went out the day before the eclipse to test my composition and from what I could tell it looked like the eclipse would cross over just like I planned. I set out the day of the eclipse found my spot and shot from beginning to end. Somewhere around noon till almost 5pm.
The Shot:
As I said above I shot through the entire eclipse. Using my Nisi solar filter. I had no way to really practice this before hand, but for the entire time, except for totality, I'm literally just photographing this tiny orange spec (the sun), just hoping I'm doing it correctly. When totality hit, I took off my filter and took several bracketed shots. When totality ended, back goes on the filter to continue shooting the sun.
To put everything together I used a shot from totality as my base layer. I then chose the photos for the time lapse of the sun and used the lighten blend mode in photoshop to add it to my composition. Full disclosure, I did a liberal use of the transform tool to make the path of the eclipse larger. I was shooting at 16mm and that wide the eclipse is pretty small in frame. To me this is actually closer to what the path looked like with your eye. Once I got everything together I edited it with adobe camera raw and Elia's software Radiant Imaging.
I'm sure there are better eclipse photos out there but overall I am very satisfied with this image. This is the most planning and time I've ever put into any image. And to have it come out better than I could've hoped for is just very rewarding. If you made it this far, thanks for reading and thanks for looking!