mrz80

Heh, your closet sounds about like mine. I've got my Dad's old Ikoflex and a stack of lenses, an F too old for any metered finder, an F2AS (my absolute favorite film camera of all time), and my wife's Pentax K-1000. There's a miscellaneous handful of Panasonic and Sony compact all-in-ones kicking about the place (I pinch my wife's Sony Cybershot for bike rides - it fits easily in a jersey pocket, has great image quality for a dinky point-n-shoot, and it's a cinch to operate one handed). There might still be a N70 in the box in the closet now that I think about it. :) For "serious" picture-taking, I used a D50 for a lot of years, until prices on refurb'ed D7000s dropped below the Spousal Pain Point :p and I grabbed one up along with an 18-200. I'll likely stick with the D7000 for however many years it lasts; it's more camera than I need most of the time already. The biggest boons on the D7000 were the AI-S coupling and the UNREAL low light capabilities. Oh, and I guess the Galaxy S4 counts as a digital cam too; it does pretty well for a cellphone.:cool:

Well, the decision was taken out of my hands (someone else bought the Nikon 80-400 :) ) so I pulled the trigger on the Sigma 400 APO. It'll get here next Friday. Now to scare up a 2x teleconverter, and download some camera control packages to try out on the D7000. The solar film came yesterday so I can start work on the solar filter for the lens soon as it gets here. My wife did some research and found a park called "The Dike" along one edge of the Clemson campus, which looks like an ideal place to set up. Two weeks and counting! :D

Total Solar Eclipse 2017 - Interactive Google Map It's an overlay onto Google Maps. Zoom in right down to street level to your hearts content. Pretty handy! :D

OK, thanks all for a VERY enlightening thread. Between this discussion, Mr. Eclipse's website, and some other threads here and there, I've got a pretty good picture of what to expect and how to go about managing shooting the eclipse. Now it comes down to pulling the trigger on a lens, and I'm completely in Waffle Mode :confused:. So, a last minute straw poll before I pull the trigger (sometime this weekend to allow for shipping, setup and practice time): 1) That silly little 500mm mirror lens 2) A Sigma 400/5.6 APO mf , prob. with a 1.4x converter 3) A Nikon 80-400/4.5-5.6, and crop Option 1's just listed for completeness' sake; far as I can tell the cheap reflex lenses have too much sample variation to risk getting a dud. The 80-400'd be the most useful *after* the eclipse, for concerts and airshows where my 18-200 daily-driver doesn't have quite enough reach. But the Sigma and a converter would get me to 500+mm, and the D7000 has plenty of low-light capability that I'm not too worried about losing the extra F-stop to the converter, and it'd be quite a bit less expensive. :) Any last minute thoughts?

I've gotten several semi-good lunar eclipse shots before, but this is my first stab at a solar eclipse. I'm not looking to do much fancy, just a couple of corona/photosphere brackets, and maybe a try at a diamond ring. We'll be in Clemson, SC; according to the charts I've seen we should have just a hair over two minutes of totality. I saw a track for the 2024 ecipse; looked like just a short stretch in the southwest somewhere; have to look at that in more detail. That's a terrific idea! Moon would have to be the same apparent size as the sun for an eclipse to work, wouldn't it? :cool: Thanks for the suggestion. I'd toyed with the idea of loading some b&w into the F2, but if I'm having sensor-coverage concerns on DX, then I definitely don't have the optical resources for 35mm! My father in law's got a fairly large, quite good telescope. Maybe in 2024 I can talk him into an eclipse hunting expedition. The reviews I've read of that "everyone relabels it" Samyang are all over the map. Apparently there's lots of sample variation. That's making me nervous, and looking much harder at the teleconverter approach (despite everyone's favorite nay-saying iconoclast Rockwell's disparagement of teleconverters as a genre :p (though in his defense, I have found his lens reviews to be pretty spot-on - I got that 70-210F4 on his recommendation, and it's a terrific lens for how little it set me back!)).

Ok, seeking advice here. From various places I've read, looks like for a DX sensor, somewhere around 400-500mm will get a decent size solar disc and still leave some rattle room around the edges for corona at totality. So, given a painfully limited budget, a D7000, and either an 18-200 or a 70-200 (the 18-200 is starting to show mechanical problems, so I'll likely go with the old-faithful 70-200 F4), would the collective wisdom of the group suggest a 1.4 or 2x teleconverter, or try one of those "everybody sells 'em" Samyang (sp?) 500mm 6.3 reflex lenses? Keep in mind the painfully limited budget. :)