Solar Eclipse

This morning there was a solar eclipse in sheffield. Today the light travelling tens of millions of miles to us was blocked for an hour as the our moon passed directally infront of the sun. Its been over 16 years since such an event has happened for the UK so I wanted to take a phot of it.

Some of the main problems you have when taking photos of the sun is how flippin bright it is. The easiest way's to take are as follows:

1. Use an Nuetral Density or "ND" filter to allow less light onto the camera allowing you to keep the aperture settings the same instead of having to increase it which would create a larger depth of field.

2.Increase the F.Stop Value (aperture) allowing the sky to become exposed correctly, depending on what value you use ofcourse.

3. Take pictures of the eclipse when the moon has fully covered the sun. Its a no brainer really, it means that you the chances of you damaging your eyes are lower and you can take pictures with more desirable settings.

So I went out and took a variety of photos, some shooting just the eclipse however later on I decided I wanted to feature more of the landscape i.e. trees and their branches.

Here are the results:

Another thing that I have had to deal with is cropping the photograph. To get the best image quality I used my 50mm 1.8 prime to take the shots. After I shot them I had to crop them massively to get decent results. Heres what one of the un-edited images look like:

For most of my shots I was shooting at F16, ISO of 200 and a shutter speed of 1/1600 for most of the shoot however as the moon slowly moved on on its orbital path the sun slowly became brighter and brighter so I had to increase the shutter speed to 1/4000.

These two crops show

Overall I am happy with the results from the shoot. Such an event should not be missed as they rarely occur, so I am glad I have documented this.