I drove down to San Antonio Friday to eat Greek food, ride some roller coasters, and hopefully see the annular eclipse. I say hopefully as cloud cover was a distinct threat to the eclipse. Greek food and Six Flags Fiesta Texas were big hits. The clouds were more confounding. It was always expected that there would be clouds in the morning and that they'd burn off before the afternoon, which is exactly what happened. They cleared out about 20 minutes before totality---for 18 minutes. Then 10 minutes worth of cloudy skies, and then nothing but blue for the rest of the day. When I saw the total eclipse in 2017 I was in a state park in Kentucky, and as soon as totality happened there was a resounding OOOOOOOOH from miles around. This time it was a similarly resounding OHHHHHHHHH!
The beauty of it, though, is that unless you're a badass astro-photographer with 5 digits worth of gear, annular eclipses are pretty boring to photograph. It's typically just an orange wedge. Turns out that in my case the clouds made for much more interesting pictures. While the ND filter gave a bluer picture than a metallicized Mylar filter, with its pretty orange tint, I think I did better than the typical orange circle. I'd been shooting at 1/100 during the early bits, and when things went south I dropped down to 1/4 which is what brought it all together.
I'm also far better refined for the big one in April. Learned quite a lot today.
Topic: Official DTF Photography Thread (Read 145942 times)
