With all of the new gear announcements made this year, its tempting to buy the photographer in your life something new and wiz bang…  While new toys are great, they can get outdated and cost a lot.  How about giving the photographer in your life the gift of education?  The books below are a collection for photographers of any level.  From leveling up technical proficiency to practice exercises to exploring the photographic journey, there is something here for everyone.

Brushing Up On Photography Skills

Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson

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Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs By Henry Carroll

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Advancing Your Photography By Marc Silber

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The Photographer’s Eye By Michael Freeman

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Light Science and Magic

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Flexing Those Photographic Muscles

The Photographer’s Playbook

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Use This If You Want To Take Great Photographs By Henry Carroll

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Creative Photography Lab: 52 Fun Exercises for Developing Self-Expression with your Camera

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How The Greats Approach the Journey

The Road to Seeing

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50 Portraits

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By far the biggest concern when photographing a solar eclipse is protecting your eyes and your camera’s sensor from damage. Looking at the sun with naked eyes can be blindness inducing. This problem gets compounded when you point your camera at the sun and look through the viewfinder… Having all of the sun’s energy captured by your lens focused on your eye – definitely a bad thing. I feel the need to get a warning out of the way:

!!!!!DO NOT, FOR ANY REASON, LOOK AT THE SUN WITHOUT PROPER PROTECTION!!!!! EVER!!!!! THIS GOES FOR LOOKING THROUGH AN OPTICAL VIEWFINDER TOO!!!!!

Now that I have that off my chest, let’s look at ways you can protect your eyes, your camera, and the rest of you. This, like the last article is a bit lengthy. It’s good information though… I promise!

Your Eyes
There are a number of ways to protect your eyes while viewing an eclipse (spoiler, sunglasses aren’t on the list). There are several DIY/low cost solutions like welding glass or looking through the disk portion of a floppy disk (yes floppy disks…). If you search google for “DIY eclipse viewer” you will get thousands of results… Your mileage will vary with these and so will your level of protection.

I would suggest you use something commercially available and designed for viewing the sun or an eclipse. Options range from a few dollars to about $20. Amazon has paper framed viewing glasses for ~$10 HERE for a 10 pack. If you want something more substantial than a paper frame, Amazon has plastic framed, wrap around, glasses HERE for ~$20.

One article I read suggested wearing an eye patch for the eye not looking through a view finder… I thought that was a bit too much, but if you want to look like a pirate, Amazon has one HERE.

Your Camera
Before we talk about protecting your camera, let’s talk viewfinders… Some of you may remember burning things with a magnifying glass when you were a kid. That thing on fire under the magnifying glass will be your eye if you look through the viewfinder of an unprotected camera. DO NOT LOOK THROUGH THE VIEWFINDER OF YOUR CAMERA UNLESS AN ADEQUATE PROTECTIVE FILTER IS ON THE LENS! And even then, it isn’t a great idea… Use live view to find the sun, find focus, and change settings on your camera. If you have an electronic viewfinder (almost exclusive to mirrorless systems) you have far less of a problem as the light through the viewfinder is generated by an LCD screen and not the sun. But there is that other eye not looking through the viewfinder. Protect that other eye too!

DIY Solutions
I stumbled across a number of DIY solutions when researching what I was going to do. One was using welding glass as an ND filter. There are many accounts on the internet of welding glass being used for long exposures and viewing the sun and they are cheap. If you have tried this in the past and it works for you – Great. I haven’t had much luck with it. The glass turned everything green and the glass was really dark. If you are shooting with a slow lens the darkness could be an issue. Welding glass comes in several levels of darkening power and I have the most aggressive – that may have been my problem with having too much light being cut… But the green is still an issue.

Solar Filter sheets are another DIY(ish) alternative. The sheets come in several sizes and are very light weight. These have two challenges: attaching them to your camera requires some work and they are really dark. The internet has many an idea on how to attach solar filter foil, so that is not a big hurdle to overcome. The darkness can be an issue though. If you are planning to shoot the eclipse with a slow lens and/or use a teleconverter (or both) you may run into a problem getting enough light into your camera… I purchased a Thousand Oaks Optical solar filter sheet from Amazon and will do a run through in a separate article. If you are using fast lenses, this is a really inexpensive option.

There are many other solutions out there from exposed and developed X-Ray film to removing the disk from a floppy disk and looking through the magnetic material. A brief Google search will give you a day’s worth of reading material on the topic. Keep in mind that any DIY solution comes with risks. The materials you use may not block enough light to be safe to look through directly at the sun or through the viewfinder. If you have any doubt in your mind, use live view to try a solution out. Don’t risk your vision…

ND Filters
ND Filters are becoming my go to option as of this writing. I currently have a 2-8 stop variable ND filter and it works great. The current hurdle is that the sun is still really bright at 8 stops. Bright to the point it is still dangerous to look through the view finder. This can be a good thing and bad… The good, my lens maxes out at f6.3, so the slow glass is not a problem… But there is still the problem of danger looking through the viewfinder. Recommendations I have read range from just wearing sunglasses to adding a second ND filter or polarizer to dim things a bit more. One of the major advantages of a variable ND filter are that I can very quickly reduce from 8-stop to 2-stop without changing the camera’s settings – a big deal during totality when things get really dark… More to come on my testing.

Another downside to ND filters is that they are not designed to block UV or infrared light. Cameras have glass filters directly on top of the sensor to filter out these wavelengths of light so that there is no need for a lens mounted filter. This means that the UV and IR energy put off by the sun is still being focused on the back of your eye. That makes this solution dangerous – especially since everything will appear dark. If ND filters are the option you choose to go with, use live view or WiFi live view to focus and change settings.

Don’t Forget the Rest of You!
You have protected your eyes and your camera, but the eclipse is in the middle of the day in August! If you get to your shooting location early, you may spend several hours in the hot summer sun. Don’t forget a hat, sun screen, appropriate clothing to help keep skin covered, water, snacks, portable shade (if you can in your location) … Don’t forget about bugs either. If you are in a swampy area or near standing water, mosquitoes could be a nuisance.

Let us know in the comments below if you have other suggestions for safely viewing/photographing an eclipse.

Now that we have a spot picked out for shooting the eclipse, we need to make sure we have the right gear. To be fair, just about any camera will work if you can put a filter on the lens (a requirement for the safety of your camera and eyes). We will cover protecting your eyes and gear in a future article. There are some gear features that will make your shooting experience easier and safer. This article may seem like it goes on forever… It does… But it is well worth the read. Back to the gear stuff:

Cameras
As I said earlier, just about any camera will do if you can protect it from the sun. Keep in mind that the features discussed below are nice to have, but not required (except manual mode). A few things to consider in a camera are:

Manual Mode: Manual mode is a requirement for shooting an eclipse. With a filter on the front of your camera things will be really dark. If your camera’s meter is left to its own devices, it will interpret the amount of darkness it sees as an under exposure and crank up your settings. This will get worse as the eclipse progresses and more of the sun is covered by the moon. And forget about during totality… Most cameras only have a few stops of exposure compensation – mine only has three. Not enough to compensate for the darkness of a filter and mostly obscured sun. You will need to be in control! If you are not comfortable with manual mode START PRACTICING NOW!!! My apologies for yelling, but don’t wait until the day of to try and figure it out. We will get to practicing in a later article too.

Articulating Screen: The eclipse in August will happen in the middle of the day – the sun will be almost strait overhead. It is hard to work with a viewfinder or LCD screen facing the ground when the camera is pointed strait up (or close to). An articulating screen allows you to view the eclipse while photographing it… And without looking directly at the sun. It also allows you to check your focus without getting under the camera.

Low Light Performance: Many of the filters used for photographing an eclipse block 10 stops or more of light. This is fine while the sun is mostly visible, but things get really dark during totality. To get a good exposure of the ring of the sun surrounding the moon or the sun’s corona, you will need to crank up the ISO to get an acceptable exposure. Especially if you are using a slow lens or a teleconverter (see the discussion on teleconverters below). The better performance your camera has in the ISO department, the cleaner your images will be in general and especially at higher ISOs.

Sensor Size: The sensor size won’t make or break the use of a camera, but it will affect the apparent size of the sun’s disk in your images. The crop factor of the sensor can actually help in your eclipse photography because it increases the apparent focal length of the lens being used. A 200mm lens on a full frame camera produces an image of the sun comparable to a 280mm lens on a 1.4x crop sensor, 300mm on a 1.5x crop, and 400mm on a 2x crop sensor. Crop sensor cameras are also cheaper to purchase or rent. Don’t let anyone with a full frame camera tell you that a larger sensor is necessary.

External Trigger: It will be almost impossible to control camera shake when using long lenses if you are using the on-camera shutter release. Any camera you are using should have a port for a wired shutter release, the ability to trip the shutter via WiFi, or have a built in intervalometer. A cable release is self-explanatory. Most cameras that support WiFi also have a way to change camera settings as well as trip the shutter remotely. This can be invaluable if your camera’s LCD screen doesn’t articulate. An intervalometer allows you to trip the shutter at regular intervals. This is really cool if you are shooting time lapses and you have to crawl on your back to see the back of the camera.

Lenses
Lenses are the piece of kit that will make the biggest difference in your photographs because they determine how large the sun appears on your camera’s sensor. In general, the longer and faster the lens, the better…

Focal Length: If you want your image of the sun to be large in the frame (without cropping) you will need a long lens. Below are some examples of what images of the sun look like at varying focal lengths. The images on a crop sensor are estimated (I don’t own a crop sensor camera)

Manual Focus: Another important feature is the ability to put your lens in manual focus. While you will need to track the sun across the sky, it won’t be getting any closer to or further away from you. Once you are confident that your focus is correct, there should be no need to change it. You may even want to use a piece of gaffer tape to keep it from shifting. Manual focus may also be a requirement depending on the minimum aperture your lens supports (more of a problem with slow glass combined with a teleconverter).

Maximum Aperture: As I have mentioned, there is not much light available during totality. If you are using slower glass (i.e. f5.6 or f6.3) you will be more reliant on shutter speed and ISO to get correct exposures during totality. Keep in mind the moon is a moving subject and it moves faster than you think. To keep the shutter speed up, use the widest possible aperture you can.

Teleconverters: These are a blessing and a curse… They increase the apparent focal length of your lens, but they also decrease the effective aperture. A 1.4x teleconverter decreases your aperture one stop (i.e. f4 to f5.6 or F5.6 to f8). A 2x teleconverter decreases aperture by two stops (i.e. f4 to f8, or f6.3 to f13). Back to the discussion on balancing the exposure triangle while keeping shutter speed high and ISO low… Depending on the lens you are using, teleconverters can be more of a problem than a help.

Tripods
Tripods are pretty much a requirement as long focal lengths make it hard to hold your camera steady. Long, fast, glass is also heavy and holding that up for two hours is a nonstarter.

Tripod Head: The head on your tripod needs to be rated to hold the weight of your rig. A DSLR with a 150-600mm lens weighs several pounds. The head needs to hold that weight with the lens pointed up. Some to the cheaper heads, or tripods that come with built in heads will have limited movement vertically. It would be tragic if your tripod head kept you from pointing your camera high enough up to see the sun… 

Height: This is not a big deal for cameras with articulating screens (or WiFi for live view), but for those without, this is huge. If you need to be under your camera to focus, change settings, or re-center the sun in your image, a short tripod will get really frustrating really fast. If you don’t have an articulating screen or WiFi live view, taller is better.

Other Little Things
Batteries: Make sure you have plenty of batteries for all of your equipment. Cameras with electronic viewfinders chew threw batteries like candy (ask anyone with a Sony). Make sure you have enough battery power to get you through your session. Also, don’t forget about your phone. If you are using it for live view via WiFi, it may need a charge too. I carry an extra battery pack so that my phone can be charging while I am using it.

Memory Cards: It seems obvious, but make sure you have plenty of memory card space to capture your images on. It would not be fun to be cleaning your memory card up while trying to get shots of the eclipse. Nothing good will come from that…

Filters
I will cover these in an article on protection for you and your camera. There are several options out there and I have come up with a solution that works for me. That’s the next article – I promise.

I told you this was going to be long 🙂 Hopefully the information here is helpful to you in planning your eclipse photography. Don’t let any of it scare you. If you don’t have some of the gear you need, you can always rent it. A few words of caution though: thousands of people will also want to rent, so get your reservations at Lensrentals.com or BorrowLenses.com in early, and get any rented gear several days in advance. You don’t want to be figuring out a different camera or lens (or both) the day of the event. We will cover practice in a few articles, but I would double down on practicing if you are renting equipment.

Leave a comment below if you have gear recommendations of your own!

There are several things anyone hoping to view an eclipse needs to keep in mind. Are you anywhere near the event? What’s the weather going to be like? Can you move to a new location if clouds move in? And these are just some of the basics. Below are some of the details you need to include in your planning to photograph the eclipse in August.

Are you near the event?
The biggest question is what path will the moon’s shadow take and will you be near it? In the US the path starts in Oregon, passes diagonally through the mid-west, and exits the continent through South Carolina. This is called the “path of totality” – the path under which the sun will be fully eclipsed.

Can you see the eclipse if you are not directly in the path of the moon’s shadow – yes! However, you will only see a partial eclipse. The further you are from the path of totality, the less of the sun’s disk will be covered by the moon. In my native Southern California, less than 50% of the sun’s disk will be covered. Neat to see, but not spectacular if great eclipse photos are your goal…

The best place I have found for information on the path of totality for the upcoming eclipse is eclipse2017.org. The site has very detailed information on the states in the path of totality and cities falling on or near the center line (the center of the path of totality). There is also information on when the eclipse begins, when totality starts, how long totality will last for that location and the time the eclipse ends completely.

Weather
Nothing would be worse than planning a trip and hauling all your gear, only to have clouds move in and block your view. Most weather forecasts are spot on accurate only a day or two out… Trying to predict the weather several months into the future is a futile enterprise… That said, there is a lot of information on historical weather and reasonable guestimations on possible cloud cover. The folks at eclipse2017.org have put together a graphic showing the average percentage of cloud cover, a historical cloud cover average, and historical cloud cover broken down by type (clear, scattered clouds, broken clouds …) here. Spoiler, if you are on a boat off of either US coast, odds are you will see 60% cloud cover or more. The highest average of any location along the path…

Mobility
Knowing that we can’t predict the weather requires developing a plan B. Having the ability to shift location, maybe by hundreds of miles, may make or break your chances of coming home with the photos you are after.

In So. Cal. I am used to having several different options for getting around. There are multiple interstates traveling north/south and just as many traveling east/west. If the path of totality were over Los Angeles, getting around (except for the traffic) would be easy. However, many of the locations in the path of totality are in rural, sparsely populated areas. Many small communities only have one way out of town in each direction. Your options to change location could be limited by the lack of roads.

Be mindful of your transportation options and plan your alternate locations way in advance. Also, give yourself plenty of time the day of the eclipse. If you need to change location because of weather, chances are that hundreds, if not thousands, of people will be doing the same thing. Allow for traffic and the pandemonium of those that didn’t have their plan B ready in advance.

Public vs. Private Property?
This is a big one! Most communities are made up of a small amount of public property (parks, community centers…) surrounded by private property. People’s homes, businesses, and farm land are all private property. These places need to be respected as the penalties for trespassing vary from a stern “talking to” by law enforcement to hefty fines. If where you want to shoot from is on private property, make sure you get permission to be there. Preferably in advance. No one wants to have 50 people knock on their door asking for permission to shoot in their yard or the parking lot of their business the day of the eclipse.

If you are shooting in a city/county park or at an eclipse oriented event, you may need to obtain a permit. You should check with the municipality in question if you have any questions. I already know that Rigby ID does not require permits… I cleared that up with Angie in the City Clerks office…

Where Am I Going to Be?
I am lucky enough that my day job is sending me to Salt Lake City – a three hour drive from where the path of totality crosses South-East Idaho. I currently have campground reservations in Rigby ID. Rigby is a few miles from the center line of the path of totality. They are also throwing one heck of a party on Main St (details at totalityawesomerigby.com). They, as of this writing, have campground spaces available – use the contact page on their web site to make a reservation.

Rigby has no permit requirements and is surrounded by a few small lakes and potato fields. If heat becomes an issue, shooting over water may help reduce the radiant heat from the ground.

If cloud cover becomes an issue I have the ability to head north-west, further into Idaho, or south-east into Wyoming or Nebraska. Given that I will have a rental car, I am willing to drive up to about five hours in either direction. That’s almost 500 miles of the path of totality available. Not a bad stretch. The only real problem is all of the national parks/forests that must be navigated around if I end up having to go very far.

My plan is to be set up by one of the lakes near Rigby. Hopefully most of the campers will head into town for the festivities and I will have my run of the place. I’m never that lucky – we’ll see where I end up.

I will have a day before article posted on August 20th with updates on where I will be, so stay tuned. It would be great to meet a few of you reading these articles.

Where Will You Be?
Leave me a note in the comments below. It would be great to hear what locations others have come up with.

If you have been keeping up with any of the major photography outlets, you have certainly heard that there is a solar eclipse happening later this year.  On August 21^st, 2017 the United States is experiencing the first, coast to coast, total solar eclipse since 1917.  This is a rare event, especially for those of us that can’t travel far to photograph such an event.

Because this year’s eclipse is rare, a lot of planning needs to go into successfully viewing it…  and photographing it…  The logistics of finding a suitable location, getting there, having the ability to move if cloud cover becomes an issue are all just a start.  Then there is the whole photography aspect if great images are your goal.

To help get you started planning, here is a list of things you need to be considering:

• Location – Where will the eclipse be most visible?  Will there be lodging? Will there be crowds?
• Gear – What camera should I use? Which lens? Other Gear? Where do I get the gear I need?
• Protection – Protecting both your eyes and your camera.
• Equipment Tests – The results of a few equipment trials
• Camera Settings – How do I get a proper exposure of the sun?  What about during eclipse “totality”?
• Practicing – Drilling on your equipment and your settings so you are confident in your abilities on the big day.

This is my first ever attempt at photographing an eclipse. Over the course of the next several articles I lay out my planning process, preparations I am making, and the practicing I will be doing to get ready for this event.  I will also post a few updates on gear I am testing as I practice and let you know what I think.  Hopefully my experiences will help you prepare as well and make photographing this event successful!