I have been anxious to photograph this event for quite some time now.
I think I was actually just excited to wear these cool glasses.
My brother lives in Spring City which happened to be in the center of totality and only an hour away.
I couldn't find many tutorials on how to shoot it so was a little nervous going into the day. I had the obvious supplies that I needed: solar eclipse glasses, solar filter, dslr, 200mm zoom lens, tripod, remote intervalometer, etc. Yet I still was not confident that I would would be able to produce the image I had on my mind.
I got my camera out about an hour before the eclipse and started practicing on the sun by itself. It went better than I expected. Once I had my spot I knew to plant it for about 3 hours. The image I wanted to produce needed the camera in the same spot for the entire duration of the eclipse.
I photographed around ISO 1000, aperture 8, and 1/500-1/1000 shutter speed. I also had to manually focus.
I used my remote to automatically take a photograph every 45 seconds. I produced nearly 300 images for the entire event. I also had to key an eye on the live view mode as I ended having to move my camera more than I expected to keep the sun in the frame.
How did I create this image?
I first uploaded all of my photos into Lightroom. From there I selected the images that I wanted and chose the option to "open a layers in photoshop." This opened up all of the images into one image canvas with each image as its own layer. From here I deleted the background out of each image only keeping the sun. Once I had all of my backgrounds deleted I individually rotated each image to perfectly align. The background comes from the very first layer or photo.
The hardest part of making sure each image was captured in focus. Editing and stacking them in photoshop was easy. I didn't edit or alter the images in any other way.
The moment everyone waits for....totality. Nearly 3 minutes of darkness. I wouldn't quite say darkness however, it was more like the blue hour. The hour after sunset and the hour before sunrise.
Stay tuned for more photography and adventures!
