Total Solar Eclipse

These are quite similar to each other, but this was a possibly-once-in-a-lifetime experience, so I erred on the side of saving more photos than usual. (Usually I try to delete photos that are too similar.) Totality was about two minutes long, but was definitely worth the cross-country trip (of course, seeing my in-laws would have been worth it anyway). I was able to take these without any filters on the camera (and without my solar glasses on). It got very dark: not midnight dark, but definitely twilight dark, and extremely eerie. I remember thinking it looked even more spectacular looking at it with my eyes instead of through the camera, so I made sure I did both. Frankly, I thought my pictures were going to be terrible: the sun was so high in the sky at the time that it was extremely difficult to position the camera on the tripod and I eventually just gave up on the tripod, but hand-holding was really difficult, too, when the filter was on the camera because the sky was totally black. Plus I was getting light-headed from looking straight up for so long. And I had NO idea what to do for the exposures. So pretty much I assumed what pictures I was getting were awful and I concentrated on just enjoying the experience. I was actually rather pleasantly surprised when I viewed the photos later. They required little to no processing other than a little cropping and were much more successful than I thought.

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