Tired of eclipse pics yet? How about some more...?
I had an entry in my calendar for the April 8th eclipse that I'd added on August 21, 2017, so not having any other jobs yesterday, I decided to go out and shoot some pictures of it.
Hearing how horrendous the eclipse traffic was back in 2017, I left the house in the dark at 4:40am and drove to eastern Indiana. The drive was fine- no traffic at all- and on the way I was able to visit my daughter in college and spend a few minutes with her before continuing on. Bonus. Then I was off by 10am.
I didn't want to just photograph the sun like everyone else was; I wanted a strong foreground to create an interesting composition. I'm fascinated by all the wind turbines in Indiana. The largest wind farm in the northwest is outside totality, so I had to find some others. I found a patch of turbines in a very remote area northeast of Indianapolis with no towns for miles. Now I just needed to find the right composition with the right turbines.
I searched for an hour or two, then settled on a good one that I could get relatively close to (they're all signposted "private property, we'll prosecute you to death", etc.) and that looked great. Then I went to to look for even better ones while I still had some time, in case there was something I'd missed. When I returned from my scouting trip, to my surprise, the good turbine had stopped spinning, so I needed a Plan B.
I finally settled on this one in the pictures. Maybe not as good as the first one– doesn't matter now. I set up three cameras- one to shoot a wide angle timelapse of the sun and turbines for 30 minutes, another with a telephoto lens to shoot the sun and moon at totality, and a drone to stay in the air, shooting 4K video from above for 25 minutes.
Am I happy with the results? They're ok. In the end, the experience of seeing the sun go out in about a second and a half was pretty cool- like suddenly going from daylight (99% coverage) to night (full totality). That was the highlight for me. Not having full cloud cover, after they kept forecasting it on the news– that was a wonderful bonus too. And the 360 degree sunset (pink, yellow and orange clouds all around the horizon) was beautiful. And spending time outdoors on a beautiful day, in the middle of no where– priceless.
Having never experienced a total solar eclipse before, I made some mistakes though. Biggest one was, I zoomed out to compose the sun in the viewfinder, then forgot to zoom back in, so instead of a 560mm shot, I only got a 280. But with a 45MP sensor, the quality is still pretty good. The other mistake was not getting closer to the turbine. I was at the edge of a cornfield and trying not to be seen too close, but if I could do it again, I'd shoot just below the turbine for a more dramatic image.
Traffic home (275 miles) was heavy in parts but not as bad as I'd heard it was in 2017, when people were parked on the interstates for hours. I made it back a little after 9pm. Good to know the back roads and stay off the interstates.
If you're interested in the technical details... the drone footage was shot with a Mavic 3 Pro set all manually- locked-in exposure so it didn't brighten up when the sun went out. The other timelapse (955 images) was shot with a Canon R3, 16mm lens, again exposure was set manually (1/125 second at f8, ISO 100), letting the sky darken during totality. The closeups of the sun/ moon were shot on a Canon R5 with the 200-400 f/4 lens, regrettably set at 200mm with the 1.4X converter flipped on.
(One of my favorite parts of the day was happening on an abandoned schoolhouse, built in 1913, on a side road while on my way to find my turbines. Fortunately it hasn't been vandalized at all, some interior doors and windows still remain and it had a great old bell tower attached, though its days are numbered.)
All in all, a grand day out.
