Eclipse 2024
I made the journey from North Carolina all the way to my wife's hometown of Plattsburgh, New York for the eclipse this past April of 2024. Plattsburgh had almost 4 minutes of totality. I've been working on this photo off and on kind of all year. I have a previous version in my portfolio that I was never 100% happy with. But, with this one I think I finally got it where I want it.
I put more planning into this than I have for any other photo ever. I spent hours on photopills and goolgle maps trying to plot out a perfect location. I knew I wanted to somehow incorporate the city and I knew I wanted to do a wide angle time lapse type shot rather than the telephoto that everyone else was doing.
When it was time I put my solar filter on and commenced to photograph a tiny bright ball (the sun) not knowing if I was doing it correctly or not. When totality hit I took the filter off and just shot brackets the entire time while also making sure to enjoy the moment. Once totality was over, filter goes back on and I continued shooting the sun until it was out of the moon's path.
To create the image I used a base layer during totality. Then a really underexposed shot of totality to bring down some of the highlight of the moon/sun and make it more visible. Then I put all of the suns in using the lighten blend mode in photoshop. Once everything was together I finished it off using radiant photo (Elia's software) and Adobe camera raw.
Shot with Sony a7iii, Zeiss 16-35mm at 16mm, f/8 and a NiSi solar filter.