The rare event of a solar eclipse, even a partial one, was not to be missed, so March 20th 2015 was marked in my diary for quite some time before the day itself.
My preparations for photographing this phenomenon began a couple of weeks before when I booked the date of the eclipse off as a holiday. There was no way I could spend three hours in the car park at work with a couple of cameras going!
My next piece of preparation was to order a sheet of black mylar sun filter material in order to make a custom filter to fit inside the lens hood of my 100-400mm zoom lens. I made this by sandwiching a circular piece of the mylar sheet between two rings of black fomex. This arrangement was a nice press fit inside the lens hood and I am very pleased with how well it worked on the day.
I arrived at my chosen location for viewing the eclipse, Rhos-on-Sea on the North Wales coast, well before the start of the action due at 8.30am, and used the time to get everything set up and bolted down to my tripod.
At this stage of the morning the sky was clear and I had a great view of the sun, so setting all my camera controls to manual I used live view at 10x magnification (with sun filter fitted!) to precisely focus on the sun's edge and then locked the focus in place.
Then I set the exposure for the sun itself.
The filter was so effective that I achieved an optimal result at 1/8 second, f11 (my preferred aperture for maximum sharpness) at base ISO of 100 with no cloud cover, and started taking one image every ten seconds at those settings about fifteen minutes before the eclipse was due to start.
I carried on shooting a frame every ten seconds right throughout the eclipse, but as the event progressed varying amounts of cloud blew across the face of the sun, which played havoc with my exposures.
Not wanting the alter the aperture or shutter speed I ended up dialling the ISO up and down between my starting figure of ISO100 and a whopping ISO125600 just in order to retain some visibility as thicker cloud passed through the scene.
About two thirds of the way through the eclipse, as the moon was moving away and the sun was being uncovered, an unpenetrable layer of cloud came over and effectively ended the show, with the sun hidden even to the naked eye.
Never mind though, as I'd managed to capture most of the eclipse in a series of 588 still photos which I then spent two weeks of leisure time lining up and editing in PhotoShop to make this video.
The next partial eclipse visible in northern Europe will be in 2026, so I think the effort put into photographing this one was well justified.
Filename - solar eclipse 03 720p v2.mp4
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens 100-400mm zoom @ 400mm
Exposure - 0.8 sec @ f11, ISO - Varies
Capture interval - 10 secs
Location - Rhos-on-Sea, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 26 seconds at 25 frames per second.
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