2024 Total Solar Eclipse
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 the app 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. I went to this spot the day before to plot out the path of the sun with PhotoPills to make sure my location would work, and sure enough everything looked like it would line up.
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. I should have practiced photographing the sun with the solar filter before hand, but I didn't. 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.