Shooting the annular eclipse

May 20th annular eclipse

This year was the first time since 1994 that an annular solar eclipse was visible in the continental US.  An annular solar eclipse is when the moon passes between the Earth and Sun, but the apparent diameter of the moon is smaller than the Sun so a ring, or annulus, appears.  Albuquerque was one of the best places to see this eclipse, falling almost directly on the center line of the shadow's path.  The other unique aspect of this eclipse, besides the annular shape, was the time of day that the eclipse occurred.  The show started about 6:30pm local time, but because of the duration, the sun was still obscured during the sunset.

The May 20th, 2012 annular eclipse path

I knew I had to get some images of this rare occurrence, but without proper protection for the camera, the sun can damage the components inside, just as it can damage a person's eyes if you look directly at it.  They make special filters for cameras and telescopes that block out the majority of the energy, but after doing some research I also found out you can use welder's filter glass as a substitute for these filters, and it is cheap!  Everything I read said to use a #14 welder's filter (the strongest), but after looking at comparisons and not finding any #14 in stock anywhere, I decided I could get away with #12 welder's glass.

I used electrical tape to attach the welder's glass I bought to an old 77mm filter ring I had laying around so I could attach it to my camera

I spent a fair amount of time doing research and looking at images of past eclipses, and decided I wanted something more unique and creative than a simple telephoto shot of the annular sun against a black background.  I really enjoy creating timelapses, because I think they are powerful at conveying a sense of time and story, and while they take a lot of planning and work, the end result leaves me with a sense of satisfaction.    The plan was to do a series of images to create a composite "timelapse" shot of the event after the fact, and also grab some landscape images in between the shots if I could manage.

The setup in the foothills of the Sandia mountains

Terah and I decided to make a date out of the evening and picked up some bbq and beer and headed up to the foothills to find a spot.  It was packed!  All kinds of people were out and about, with tripods and telescopes and homemade viewers and everything in between setup.  Eventually we found a decent spot on a hillside looking west.

The view from our spot.  I was worried about the hill on the right blocking the end of the eclipse, which it did, but it turned out to be a good thing

I used a intervalometer remote attached to the camera to take my sequence of images.  I started 3 minutes before the start of the eclipse, and took an image every two and a half minutes.  The filter I made did a good job of blocking the light, giving me exposures at ISO100, f11 of 1/1000 of a second.  

The final composite sequence of the May 20th, 2012 eclipse

In the final composite sequence image I put together, I ended up not using every image I took, it was too cluttered for my liking with a shot every two and a half minutes, so it shows the sun at five minute increments.  We had a lot of time to waste, so I did some experiments using my iphone camera:

iphone shot, notice the small eclipse shaped reflection

iphone shot using the welder's glass filter to shoot through

iphone shot, taken when the full annulus was showing, which shows up in the reflection on the right

I did switch over to my telephoto lens several times during the eclipse to get a few zoomed in shots of the eclipse, mainly during the full annular duration.  Because I don't have a 2nd body, this was a fun excercise in frantic lens swapping that Terah helped with.  We were able to do it within the two and a half minutes between sequence shots without moving the sequence tripod at all!

I knew going in silhouette images would be my best bet, and they didn't disappoint

The hill I was worried about when we first set up at our spot turned out to be a blessing.  It was obvious as the eclipse continued that the hill would block a portion of the event from where we were, but when that happened I switched to my telephoto lens and was able to get some great shots of the watchers up on the ridge.

Lots of activity up on the ridge

A few remain on the ridge as the eclipse starts to set

Eventually we headed down the hill and back towards our home, and with the unobstructed view of the horizon, we got one last peak at the setting eclipse sun.

Goodbye Mr. Eclipse

It was such an awesome experience shooting and watching the eclipse on May 20th.  Definitely lucky to have been in the path for this one, I know lots of friends who weren't so lucky.  The good news is, in 2017 a total eclipse will be visible over large portions of the continental US, with prime viewing locations in the rocky mountain and great plains regions, so make your plans now!

The Smoking Lightbulb

The Smoking Bulb

Earlier this week I posted this image to facebook and got lots of interest, and some questions on how it was done.  This offered the perfect opportunity for a giveaway contest, something I've been wanting to do for a while on my facebook page!  I'll get to the winners of the 16x20 print giveaway at the end of this post, but first I'm going to explain what went into the creation of this image.

 I had a lot of fun conceptualizing, planning, shooting, and editing this image, and I am really happy with how the final turned out.  I think it began with an image I saw on flickr of a broken light bulb going up in smoke, but it didn't have much artistic appeal to it and I didn't like the broken glass really.  I wanted to create an image that seemed to defy what you knew about light bulbs, and one that was minimalistic but striking.

Your typical incandescent bulb works by flowing electricity through the filament, glowing to give off light.  The bulbs are filled with an inert gas or evacuated, which prevents the hot filament from reacting with oxygen to combust.  All I needed to do to get one to burn up was remove or break the glass to let the oxygen in.  I bought half a dozen clear light bulbs from home depot as well as a work light.  These lights are cheap, are easy to attach with the clamp, and allow you to remove the reflector dish to get just the bare bulb, exactly what I wanted.

6" work light from home depot for $7

I quickly found out that breaking the glass on the bulb without breaking the thin filiament inside was not a trivial task.  I tried several times to use a small hammer to break a small hole in the very top and each time the shattered glass took out the filament with it.  I eventually used pliers near the base of the bulb, squeezing tightly on the glass, and got several successful bulbs with the glass removed.  If you do this, put the bulb and pliers inside a plastic bag so all the glass is contained, it makes clean up a breeze.  I kept one complete bulb to photograph as well.

Lighting diagram for the light bulb shots

The lighting setup is straight forward.  I used two bare flashes on lightstands and set each to manual power, so I could adjust after each shot.  I zoomed the flash heads in to 105mm to avoid spill light anywhere else in the room and get that harsh light I wanted.  I triggered them wirelessly using the pop up flash on my 7d.

The settings I started with on my camera were manual mode, 1/250 sec., f16, ISO 200, flash WB.  I used my Canon 7d with the EF 24-105 f4L lens on it, zoomed all the way in to 105mm and manually focused on the bulb.  Because the flash sync speed for my camera is 1/250, I could not go any higher than that for my shutter speed.  These settings gave me a completely black room without any flash, which I wanted to get the black background.  After I made sure I had the black background, I adjusted the flash power output to get the lighting on the bulb I wanted. 

My "studio" - the sunroom in our house.  (Iphone shot)

I spent about half an hour photographing the complete, unbroken light bulb. I used double stick tape to hold the bulb in place on top of the tripod.  After I was happy with the variety of shots and lighting in the images I captured of the complete bulb, it was time to move to the bare bulbs!

For this part, I turned off the flashes, as the flame from the burning filament is enough to light up the smoke.  The combustion of the bare bulb filament takes only a few seconds, so I switched to high speed shutter mode, 8 frames per second.  I plugged the work light into a power strip that had a on/off switch, and used a cable release to start shooting.  As soon as I started shooting, I flipped the on/off switch on the power strip, and the bulb went up in smoke.  Each bulb is worthless afterwards.  I did three tries at it.

After going through all the images (I shot over 300!) I narrowed them down to 4 images that I thought would be the best to use to composite together for what I had in mind:  bulb outline, bulb socket, bulb stem, and the flaming filament.  The four images I started with are shown below.

The outer edge of the bulb

I used this for the bottom socket, to replace the work light

I liked the inner stem on this one better than when it was lit from the flame

And finally, the burning filament shot, with the smoke above

After adding each of these into separate layers and lining them up, I added masks to hide the parts that I did not want.  I had the composite shot I wanted, but it needed some tweaking to make it pop.  I added additional layers to bring out the smoke, the detail in the glass and the socket, clean up the glass outline, and enhance the color of the glass, smoke and flame.  I happened to use plugins I have for photoshop to do this (Nik Color Efex and Topax Adjust) but these things could have easily been done with adjustment layers in photoshop if I did not have those plugins.  Finally, I did some cleanup to remove blemishes and cropped the image from horizontal to vertical.

The layers panel from photoshop once I finished the image.  13 layers total.

So who won the contest to guess how this was done?  There were lots of responses, and all of them were great!  Some guessed a single image, with extensive photoshopping, others thought I used a candle to get the smoke, and hid it behind the light bulb.  Several people guessed correctly that this was a composite of at least two images, it would have been very difficult, although not impossible (if I could successfully break a small hole in the top) to do it without multiple images.  The gap in the top of the glass outline was achieved using the lighting setup at bulb height, 180 degrees apart and not a photoshop edit.

This animated shows the different layers used to create the image, from black background to completed image

Sarah Kannenberg, Elaina Porter Janes, Kelly Gentz, and Jacob Rice all had great guesses that came really, really close, but the winner has to be Justin Vallely with this response:

I'm guessing you have multiple images layered on top of each other. At least 2 images.

Photo 1: Normal clear glass bulb, 2 flashes (1 on each side, 180 degrees apart). This provides the image for the glass and base. Photoshop might have been used to erase the glass at top dead center.
Photo 2: Same bulb with the glass broken/removed. Being exposed to oxygen now without the glass, the filament should burn when switched on. Base of the bulb in a fixture is photoshopped out, glass stem and burning filament are all that are left. No streaking and no "star bursts" so I'm guessing large aperture, quick shutter.

 Congrats Justin, I'll email you details of how to order your print.  Thanks to everyone for participating, I will definitely be doing another contest in the future, so stay tuned.  Hope everyone enjoyed the detailed description of this image as much as I enjoyed creating it.  Did I forget to cover something?  Leave a comment and I'll address it.

Happy Shooting!

Tips for getting exciting, sharp action shots

Besides doing photography for my own personal enjoyment and the occasional wedding or portrait session, I have worked for a local company for the past 4 years taking youth sports photos.  Every spring and fall we shoot the local soccer clubs team and individual shots, and while it is not terrible pay, it is not the most thrilling thing to shoot as a photographer.  Lately we have been trying to get into covering the soccer tournaments shooting action shots, a much more exciting subject for us photographers and something a lot of kids and parents can get excited about too.

 Sports photography at first might sound easy, but it quickly becomes apparent how difficult it can be.  Even the best photography gear out there does not take the user out of the equation. Below are some "best practices" to help get great shots of your kids or others. 

- If your camera has it, work in manual or shutter priority mode.  For a typical sunny/partly cloudy day, a good starting point is 1/1000 sec, f4, ISO 100.  Depending on what lens you have, you will have to vary this.  Your shutter speed should always be 1/500th or faster to ensure freezing the action.
- Shoot as wide open as you can to get that shallow depth of field.
- Most cameras have a couple of different focus methods.  You want the tracking mode, on canon cameras this is AI Servo mode.  This mode will actively search for moving subjects and keep focus.

- Use a monopod if you have one.
- Wear sunscreen. :)
- Shoot with the sun at your back so it lights up the kids.
- I like to position myself about 20 yards from the goal line on a side.  This lets you get good shots of both sides of action.
- Use the longest telephoto you have.  If you have a tele-converter, use it too.  For these, I used my 70-200 f2.8 with a 1.4x tele-converter, which cuts 1 stop of light so it becomes f4.  The longer the focal length and smaller your F number, the more separation you will get from your background.

The Canon 7d auto-focus modes

- Every camera has a slightly different auto-focus system, so it is hard to generalize what to do, but I'll go over what I use on my Canon 7d.  There are 5 auto focus modes available on the 7d, covering almost the entire frame down to a single point in the frame.  I have tried the Automatic AF selection before with mixed results.  I think this is too broad an area for the camera to work with, so it has a hard time determining what you mean to focus on.  Similarly, the single AF point is too focused.  Kids are unpredictable, and I'm not good enough to keep that small point on them the whole time.  I use the AF expansion mode, which uses a selected AF point and adds the 4 points around the outside of it.  This gives you some room to play with, if you keep the center point on the child and it moves suddenly to one of the neighbor points, you won't loose focus.  Play around with your camera to decide which one you like best.

 - If you use a single AF point or AF expansion like mentioned above, use the center AF point and always center the action.  There are two reasons for this:  first, it keeps the action in the center of the frame and cuts down on the number of shots that will be cut off near the edge of the frame, and second, the center AF points are always the most accurate.
- I like to use single shot shooting mode with kids.  The reason I do not use the high speed (8 frames/sec on the 7d) mode is because it fills up the memory card extremely fast and I do not really have the need to catch that "cover photo" like moment in these shots.  I'm not trying to get on the cover of Sports Illustrated, I'm just trying to get a photo that shows the child in motion really.  Keeping my eye up to the viewfinder and following the ball, I got really good at anticipating the kick or the shot or whatever was going to happen.  Try both methods and see what you like.

 - Speaking of looking through the viewfinder, keep both eyes open.  It helps you be aware of what is going on outside the frame, and after not too long squinting with one eye through a viewfinder, your eyes will start to revolt.
- Shoot in the vertical orientation.  A battery grip really helps out with this.
- Finally, be courteous to the refs, linesman, and other parents.  No one likes a photographer who gets in the way ;).

Happy Shooting!