What are the strategies for eclipse photography?

The basic method of shooting and photographing solar eclipse only needs to combine the basic method of ordinary celestial photography and shooting with the basic method of visually observing the sun mentioned above.

Here is the basic method of celestial photography. Since the era of digital photography has arrived, what we say below is based on digital photography equipment, unless otherwise specified.

The simplest method of celestial photography-shoot directly with the camera! For the sun, the telephoto end of many cameras is enough to take larger images, so in the non-total eclipse stage, we only need to cover the filter in front of the camera lens to take pictures easily.

If you use the ink basin method or telescope projection method to observe the solar eclipse, just take pictures of what you see. As for the total solar eclipse stage, just shoot at the sun with a camera.

Many creative photography can also be achieved by direct shooting with a camera. The most classic is to shoot a string of Sugar-Coated Berry during the total solar eclipse.

On June 3, 2005, an annular solar eclipse occurred in Madrid, Spain. Someone took pictures in this way at that time.

The sun in the photo shows the whole process of solar eclipse from left to right. Do you know how this photo was taken? It turns out that this is achieved by a camera that can be exposed many times. The camera that can achieve multiple exposures is generally a film SLR, and some high-end digital SLR cameras also have this function. Here we take the film SLR as an example.

Multiple exposure means that after a photo is taken, it is not rolled up first, but also exposed again with the same negative, so as to obtain some special shooting effects.

Specific to this photo of the eclipse, the photographer first selected the shooting location, and then stepped on the spot in advance to see the approximate position of the sun at the beginning and end of the eclipse and determine how to take a view.

Because the sun has a Sunday apparent motion, the whole process of total solar eclipse and annular solar eclipse lasts for a long time, and the position of the sun will be very different at the beginning and end of the eclipse. When taking pictures, make sure that the sun is on the left side of the picture at the beginning of the eclipse, and on the right side of the picture at the end of the eclipse. The whole process of the eclipse can be on the picture, and try not to be blocked by buildings.

On the day of the eclipse, the photographer will take photos in the way determined when stepping on the spot. At the beginning of the eclipse, a filter was added in front of the camera to take the first image of the sun. Then after a period of time (for example, 10 minutes), repeat exposure on the same negative, take another sun image, and so on.

Because of the use of filters, the brightness of the ground scene is too dark compared with the sun, and it is impossible to shoot at all. When a total solar eclipse or annular solar eclipse occurs, we take off the filter and shoot the sun directly, so we can shoot the ground scenery at the same time. In the next last contact, we used the filter again and took pictures one by one until the end.

In this way, we finally took a series of images of the whole process of solar eclipse on the negative.

So can you take such a series of images with an ordinary digital camera? It is not possible to shoot directly, but it is possible to synthesize multiple photos later.