Canon Eclipse Photos August 21, 2017

Share your Canon Eclipse Photos here. Same guidelines as Canon Photo Thursday. :)

 

This shot was taken just North of Philadelphia in Bucks County Pennsylvania. Brutal conditions for eclipse photography here. The sky was overcast with barely a break here and there to see the eclipse barely make it through the cloud cover, every so often. I made the best of what I could get, the clouds making a somewhat dramatic effect for this shot as darkness ruled the skies for a few short moments across parts of North America.

 

Canon 5D Mark IV with a Tamron 70-200mm lens at 200mm - 1/400th sec -F/5 - ISO 100 - with a two stacked HD filters ( a 10 stop and a 4 stop) plus a CP filter perhaps giving another 1 stop. This was shot in live view mode of course.

 

I am looking forward to seeing what our Canon members managed to capture.

 

I was also hampered by heavy overcast. Only 15-20min after maxima did the clouds thin enough to get anything. This was about the best I could pull out. 5D3 - 70-300/4-5.6 IS - 2x TC - Variable ND - 600mm / ISO 200 / f16 / 1/200

 

I think I'll have to run through post again and see if I can crisp it up.

 

Edited August 22, 2017 by Marcus Ian

Canon 80D with 70-200 F/4 @ 200mm using a Daystar Solar Filter in Chicago.

It got too cloudy after this shot, so I stopped.

The Start

 

The Start by David Stephens, on Flickr

Corona With Flares

 

Corona With Flares by David Stephens, on Flickr

Diamond Ring (with flares, real and not so real)

 

Diamond Ring by David Stephens, on Flickr

 

These were taken on the Wyoming/Nebraska border, near Agate, WY, where we simply pulled off the roadside. This is a 5D MkIV, with EF 500mm f/4L IS II and an EF 1.4x TC-III, on Induro tripod, with a Spectrum Telescope glass solar filter for the start image. The corona and ring images are with no filter. RAW conversion with DxO Optics Pro, with PRIME pixel-by-pixel noise reduction. The first two have almost no processing, except Micro Contrast. The ring image, has increased blacks and giantly lowered Highlights. The rays were helped along by an f/45 aperture. (I was spinning the dials fast as the sun emerged from behind the moon and ended up with a happy accident.)

 

I have images of the diamond without so much lens distortion, but I looked at the processing by many others, including those that Getty is putting forward, and found that this type of distortion and processing is prevalent. Most people don't realize that such a large part of the image is lens distortion and not something that you'll see in an "accurate" picture of this phenomenon. So, sue me! ;-)

Edited August 22, 2017 by dcstep

The Start

 

The Start by David Stephens, on Flickr

Corona With Flares

 

Corona With Flares by David Stephens, on Flickr

Diamond Ring (with flares, real and not so real)

 

Diamond Ring by David Stephens, on Flickr

 

These were taken on the Wyoming/Nebraska border, near Agate, WY, where we simply pulled off the roadside. This is a 5D MkIV, with EF 500mm f/4L IS II and an EF 1.4x TC-III, on Induro tripod, with a Spectrum Telescope glass solar filter for the start image. The corona and ring images are with no filter. RAW conversion with DxO Optics Pro, with PRIME pixel-by-pixel noise reduction. The first two have almost no processing, except Micro Contrast. The ring image, has increased blacks and giantly lowered Highlights. The rays were helped along by an f/45 aperture. (I was spinning the dials fast as the sun emerged from behind the moon and ended up with a happy accident.)

 

I have images of the diamond without so much lens distortion, but I looked at the processing by many others, including those that Getty is putting forward, and found that this type of distortion and processing is prevalent. Most people don't realize that such a large part of the image is lens distortion and not something that you'll see in an "accurate" picture of this phenomenon. So, sue me! ;-)

Beautiful shots, DCStep. Thanks for posting the info on them. I was going to ask about that if you hadn't. Sun spots are real nice.

Beautiful shots, DCStep. Thanks for posting the info on them. I was going to ask about that if you hadn't. Sun spots are real nice.

 

Thanks, very much.

 

I was pleased that we had sun spots and that they showed up so well. When I tested my filter a few weeks ago, I thought I might have done something wrong, because I saw no spots. I happened to test on a day when there were no spots. I'm also very pleased that the flares showed so clearly.

Got to say that those who had a little cloud cover got a better deal photographically in my opinion.

I wanted to use my new Canon 5D IV for eclipse photography, but the one suitable lens that I own is a Sigma 70-300mm of only OK quality. I do own a higher quality 400mm lens, but it is for my old Sony A700, which does not have mirror lock up or live view, which, after testing both, were determined to be more important than the lens for longer exposures (up to 2s to capture the outer corona during totality). I described my camera set-up, where I mounted the camera piggy-back on a tracking telescope, elsewhere in the Casual Photo Conversations forum. Here is a photo of the inner corona (ISO 200, f:8.0, 1/200 s). Despite the 5D IV's wide dynamic range, it is no where near enough to capture the wide range of luminosities of the corona (more than 20 stops variation), so I took a wide range of exposures and hope to blend images to show a more or less complete corona.

I agree that the cloud cover actually helped in some ways. I had a #13 welding mask to shoot through (which was definitely dark enough) but it created a lot of weird flare and other effects, so shooting in the partly cloudy conditions turned out to be a good thing. This was with my 5D3 and 100-400.

Giedi Prime

 

Canon 50D EF 100-400mm IS

I wanted to use my new Canon 5D IV for eclipse photography, but the one suitable lens that I own is a Sigma 70-300mm of only OK quality. I do own a higher quality 400mm lens, but it is for my old Sony A700, which does not have mirror lock up or live view, which, after testing both, were determined to be more important than the lens for longer exposures (up to 2s to capture the outer corona during totality). I described my camera set-up, where I mounted the camera piggy-back on a tracking telescope, elsewhere in the Casual Photo Conversations forum. Here is a photo of the inner corona (ISO 200, f:8.0, 1/200 s). Despite the 5D IV's wide dynamic range, it is no where near enough to capture the wide range of luminosities of the corona (more than 20 stops variation), so I took a wide range of exposures and hope to blend images to show a more or less complete corona.

 

Nice image. Yeah, you need an HDR stack to get the full DR. I'm going to look back through my images, where I changed exposure quickly, to see if I can make a stack.

Thanks DC. Here is my initial attempt to blend three images taken at ISO 200, f:8.0, 1/200s, 1/60s, and 0.4s. I used Photoshop CS5 and manually blended three layers. I have, so far, been unsuccessful at using Photoshop's HDR software to automatically blend the images. Longer exposure images (up to 2s) show more of the corona distant from the sun, but are proving difficult to blend with the other images. The star to the lower left of the sun is, I believe, Regulus, in the constellation Leo the lion. Edited August 24, 2017 by Glenn McCreery

End of totality (third contact).

Glenn, you get lens flare very similar to mine in you "third contact" shot. I need to go back to look for Regulus. (BTW, I love that flare).

 

I was on the Wyoming/Nebraska border. Where were you? It's interesting to note how the positions of the "diamonds" changed as the moon/sun traveled across the USA.

 

My results on the corona, so far, are very similar to yours. The corona near the moon requires a very low EV, which I don't think that I did. In 2024, I may make getting the corona optimally one of my primary objectives. I think that our HDR stack will need to cover close to 20-stops.

DC - I was close to the other end of Wyoming, in Teton County, Idaho. I had my camera mounted piggy-back on a telescope, which tracked the sun. My home-made mount was tilted about 35 or 40 degrees from the horizontal when mounted on the telescope tube, which probably accounts for the orientation differences in our photos. The mount was tilted to fit it's base in the mounting holes for a finder that was removed. (However, there is no up or down in outer space.) :}

 

You and JDM got more of the diamond-ring effect than I did in your images of the end of totality. I was probably only about one or two seconds late opening the shutter to do likewise.

I combined my eclipse photos to make composite mosaic. The eclipse progresses from left to right. Compressing the mosaic to 1,000 pixels wide loses a lot of resolution, my 80 mb flattened psd file becomes a 65 kb jpeg file!

Edited August 27, 2017 by Glenn McCreery

 

I have been playing with various methods of compositing my totality images after deciding that HDR software is inadequate. I have been following a method of using a stack of images, selecting them all and declaring them to be a smart object, with blend mode selected as "mean". The method is described by Russell Preston Brown at

(look up advanced eclipse imaging (Part 1) on YouTube by Russell Preston Brown. I can't seem to inset just the web page without also inserting the video). The resulting image is an improvement over my earlier attempts . This image was further sharpened by using a method described by the same Russell Preston Brown in "Advanced Eclipse Imaging (Part 2) . The method involves using image calculations and a layer with a radial blur filter with "spin" as the blur method. I used Digital Photo Professional 4 for the initial RAW conversions to tiff files of the 5 initial images with separate exposures and then Photoshop CS5 for all remaining editing. If this seems like a lot of work with a fairly steep learning curve, well it is, but I will not have any new totality images to play with until, probably, 2024.

Edited September 6, 2017 by Glenn McCreery

Thanks for sharing your method Glenn!