My Total Solar Eclipse Experience
If you try sometimes, you just might find...
It seemed like the day of the solar eclipse was a long time coming. For weeks, I had been reading up on how to photograph the ‘once in a lifetime’ event. Watching all the YouTube videos about ordering, using and removing solar filters and glasses at the appropriate times, capturing the sun’s corona with 9 frame bracketed exposures, sunspots, prominences, positions of the nearby planets and a comet no less, plus the all important diamond ring effect and the elusive baily’s beads.
A common theme in all this advice was to plan ahead and keep a cool head. While the partial eclipse would last for about an hour either side of the main event, the moment of totality would last only 3 minutes or less, depending on how close you were to the centre of the moon shadow’s path. Hint: my view would be shorter. You had to be prepared. You had to have a plan. You had to shoot like crazy when the time came.
I was now filled to overflowing with more knowledge than I knew what to do with, crammed into my already overheated head. The excitement was building and all eyes had turned to the weather forecasts, which being Springtime, had fluctuating wildly in the days leading up to the big event.
Come game day, I was awake early. There to greet the sun as it rose over the hill near our house.
High level clouds were approaching from the west which made for a dramatic sunrise. The remnants of a storm that had raced across America from the Pacific and was now creeping menacingly across the Great Lakes region, ready to ruin someone’s eclipse day. Would it be me?
The weather prognosticators seemed unable or unwilling to pin down when and where the worst of the cloud cover would be during the all important 2 hour period. At best, they admitted that clear skies were out of the question. But as for overcast skies, that would come down to a matter of timing and luck. “High level clouds would be okay. Not ideal, but not disastrous either,” they said.
The situation was beginning to look dire for the Niagara Region. All those people gathered at Niagara Falls, billed as the best place to view the eclipse in America. But of course, that was just marketing. People had been gathering from around the globe all along the path of totality from Mexico to Newfoundland. And what a path it was. More people were potentially going to see this eclipse than any previous solar eclipse in history, with over 30 million of us in its path. The truth was, some of those people were going to see a full total eclipse of the sun and some weren’t.
Living just outside the path myself, I had decided to travel the 20 miles south to a private property in Brighton, Ontario just outside of Presqu’ile Provincial Park on the shores of Lake Ontario. I would be on Beach 2 as the park people call it. Visibility at zero hour, 3:20 PM, was going to be a crapshoot. Maybe I should have headed for the Eastern Townships in Quebec where things were looking brighter. It was too late now.
Looking back in time, I remembered a previous encounter I’d had with with a solar eclipse. On July 20, 1963, a short solar eclipse, under a minute, passed in a narrow path over nearby Bangor, Maine when my family was camping at Long Lake. We were close enough to the path of totality that the skies darkened, but they didn’t go totally black. Still, it left enough of an impression on me at age 7 to recall it some six decades later. Solar eclipses are like that. They have great staying power. There’s something about them that seems to stir the soul.
So what were the odds that 6o years later, I would find myself sitting on a beach near another town called Brighton, waiting for a solar eclipse? Yes, I had made my choice and I was going to see or not see the eclipse at Brighton, Ontario.
When I arrived at the beach, the sun was shining and the clouds were variable. If this weather could hold, it might be okay. Still, the clouds out to the west looked ominous. I ate my packed lunch quietly, hoping against hope that what I was seeing before me wasn’t really the case.
My mood was somber as I realized things were getting worse. Lower level clouds were beginning to fill the sky. The photos above show their arrival. The air temperature dropped significantly as the sun was extinguished from view. I had dressed in layers, but decided to head back to the car after a while to stay warm. All my plans were for a clear sky or one with high level clouds only. Dang! It looked like I was going to have to settle for a different experience.
I returned to the beach at 2:05, minutes before first contact, the moment when the moon first appears to eclipse the sun. No sun and no moon were to be seen. Just clouds. I waited and watched, keeping my eyes up and my brain alert.
And then at 2:33 PM, like a miracle, there was a brief break in the clouds. This one’s for you Dad.
I was lucky to get this shot. It was a moment of sublimity and it left a smile on my face. Of course, I didn’t really need the solar filter on my camera, as the clouds were doing a fine job of protecting my eyes and camera sensor, but I’m glad I had it on as I like the way the filter colours the clouds, which had now become a main feature of my eclipse experience. And then as fast as my view of the eclipse had appeared, it was gone again. Not to return as it turned out.
Still, I sat and waited by the lake and thought about a lot of things. Of life in general and my place in it. And the time passed both slowly and quickly. And then I got distracted. I started to lose track of time. I was thinking about how I would photograph the moon’s shadow as it passed overhead.
My head seemed to be lost in a fog. The time was drawing near. At 3:20, everything would change, but how? Nobody had talked about what it was like under cloud cover. I knew there would be no photos of a black hole sun, no bailey’s bead, no diamond ring for this boy. Perhaps I was starting to feel a bit sorry for myself. Why hadn’t I just hung out with some other people. I began to feel very alone. I had made a big mistake.
And then with just moments to go, I made a rash decision. I decided to change location, heading back from the water’s edge up the beach path towards the house and the gazebo that stood at the edge of my host’s property. I don’t know what came over me. It was like I was being moved by unseen forces. And then the light started to change.
What? Now? But I’m not ready. My cameras are all packed in their bags and I’m carrying this chair and cushion and wait, I’m not ready.
But of course ready or not, there is no extra time to be had when the moon’s shadow is moving toward you at 3000 mile per hour.
I dropped the chair and cushion I was carrying. And tried to throw my camera bags to the ground, but one wouldn’t go. It was caught on my hat. The hat that was supposed to protect me from the sun, but had been employed for the last hour keeping my head warm, and was now tangled with a camera strap. I flipped it forward off my head and it caught my glasses which tumbled to the ground in the falling dark.
“I’ve lost my glasses!” I exclaimed to myself out loud.
Down on my hands and knees I went, feeling around for my lost specs. I can’t believe this is the culmination of all my planning. That I will spend totality searching on hands and knees in the dark for the one tool I rely on every waking hour of my life to keep me from being the village idiot.
There they are! I whipped them back on noticing as I did, sand pouring across my face. I yanked out the camera and lens. Damn, wrong lens! I’m not going to be able to shoot anything with a telephoto in the dark. I changed to my fast wide angle as quickly as I’ve ever done and was on my feet searching and shooting in one fluid motion.
At last I could take in the scene around me. The lights in the nearby houses were on. It was pitch dark. Change the camera settings. Like two in the morning dark, but there was also a strange light at the edges of my vision. Daylight from beyond the shadow and it was approaching fast.
I was already shooting. Clicking the shutter, at first without intention, but within a frame or two, I found my target and proceeded to create a panorama from dark to light.
Click, click, click, cick, click, click. Shoot first, ask questions later. Intuition was my only plan now. And I think it worked. Here is my stitched panorama from three of the selected frames.
I know. It’s dark. Very dark, but that’s exactly how it was. Spooky dark. You may not even be able to make out the details in the shadows on first glance. But look again. Let your eyes become accustomed to the lack of light. Try to block out the white page that surrounds it. Click on it to open it in a separate view. The shadow details are there. You can see the path leading to the beach. The flower pot sitting by the gazebo, the trees in the background, High Bluff Island in the distance through the gazebo and the total darkness of the eclipse on the left side of the frame.
It’s not even a photo about light. It’s a photo about dark. Darkness at the edge of a solar eclipse. A total solar eclipse. A ‘once in a lifetime’ event.
The light returned to normal. Fast. Just as fast as it had arrive. I was shaking. What had just happened? Oh man. So that’s an eclipse. What a mind blast!
Now that it had passed, I started to feel more myself again. It was like spending a few minutes in a netherworld. Neither heaven nor hell. But definitely beside myself.
I looked northward, towards home. It’s seems sunny up that way. I bet I could still capture the partial eclipse if I headed North. I didn’t second guess this thought. I was in the car and negotiating traffic within minutes. Like the aftermath of a movie, the traffic was already heavy, but not so bad that it impeded my escape northwards.
At Orland on highway 30, I could see the clouds thining. I pulled into a farmers field from the constant stream of traffic and jumped out of the car. Leaning on my vehicle’s front windshield, I steadied my camera again, this time with the long lens and the solar filter. I was immediately rewarded.
I won’t show all of the pictures I took over the next — I don’t know how long. They are far too repetitive. Over the course of the last few days, I have sorted through them, noting some of the better ones. The clouds came and went forcing me into different exposures. Trying various exposure combinations to achieve different effects in the variable light. I found sorting them by ISO helped in my review, so that’s how I’ve sorted them here. The lower the ISO, the more detail and less grainy they are. All rely on clouds to tell their story.
And then we get into the higher ISOs, where the clouds become more prominent features and the compositions more variable.
And perhaps my favourite image of the day. The eclipse seemingly caught in a dragon’s breath.
Beyond the frustrations and rewards of the day’s shoot, I found the whole experience extremely humbling. Certainly something I will remember for a long time, if not forever. I went out with a plan and I had the audacity to think I was going to keep a level head. That everything would go smoothly.
But faced with the speed, elusiveness and enormity of my subject I simply crumbled under the stress of it. I will be happy to go back to photographing more predictive events such as are more normal within our natural environment.
My ego took a bit of a bruising, but I came away from the event with some unique photos of a once in a lifetime event. That, after all, was the primary goal.
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find
You get what you need
- The Rolling Stones
Of course, I can’t leave this column without showing at least one of the images which got away from me that day. One of the sweet shots that all solar eclipse chasers need in their portfolio. The Internet has been flooded with them of late. Some priceless, some near misses and some embarrassingly fake. Here is a charming image of The Diamond Ring by astrophotographer Neeti Kumthekar and what she had to say about her photographic experience, which resonates deeply with me.
It felt like I should have grown three brains and 2 extra sets of hands to be able to get the shots I had planned to get during the meagre three minutes of totality. It was pretty easy going in the partial phase since nothing was changing atmosphere wise or camera settings wise…star tracker was doing its job of keeping the sun in the center of the frame, so I could just chill and take my shots. All hell broke loose in my brain 10 seconds before the totality hit. I got to get Baily’s beads and then the diamond ring and then the Corona and then the earthshine and then the Baily’s beads again and then the second diamond ring and in there somewhere I have to pick up my second camera and take the sunrise effect on the horizon with wide lens and doing all that, remember to take it all in…look around… take off the solar glasses and look at the sun with naked eyes…experience the chill in the air…hear crickets and wildlife in the quiet of the darkened sky… and on top of it, deal with the surreal feeling that completely overwhelms your psyche and brings tears to your eyes and you get goosebumps all over…….all this in 3 minutes..and oh I forgot to mention use the second camera to find the freaking comet Pons-Brooks that was supposed to make its appearance under Jupiter…. Like I said, three brains and two sets of extra hands…one of those brains job is just to keep you calm… long story short, I missed my first Diamond Ring and I had to let the comet rest easy wherever he was and forgot to take the sunrise color horizon with my camera (I did take an iphone shot though)…most importantly, I absorbed the moment of the ethereal beauty of mother nature, with oooohs and aaahs around me, getting completely awestruck with that unforgettable experience…
My solar experience over, I headed home. My favourite starman was playing on the radio. It seemed appropriate.
Such an enjoyable write up - mind blast is the perfect term for the experience!! I'm glad you found your glasses just in time! For the rest of the day we had "eclipse brain" and felt almost woozy and out of it, it was bizarre! We enjoyed the eclipse with 3 kids ages 5-8 - I was glad to read of your memories at 7 years old, it will be interesting to see how enduring this eclipse will be for them.
Beauty shots John!