Chasing the Solar Eclipse of 2012

In less than a week I fly to Cairns to watch and shoot the total solar eclipse. It will be my first time seeing one!!

I’ll be flying thousands of kilometres and spending hundreds of dollars to shoot five cameras at an event that lasts just two minutes and has about a 50% chance of being completely clouded out!

No pressure XD

In this post I’m going to talk briefly about what I’m planning to do with the different cameras I’m taking, and tell you how you can all (hopefully) watch the eclipse live with me!

Five cameras

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I want to do my best to capture the eclipse and the experience to the best of my ability and with the equipment I have, so this is what I have in mind:

Canon 5D MkIII
This is my primary camera these days. I will be using my Sigma 50-500mm telephoto lens and putting the combination on my Induro CT314 tripod. This will be a big heavy combination, but it should allow me to get good close photos of the eclipse from a stable platform. I will be using a hand-me-down 6″ telescope solar filter (graciously given by my friend and solar eclipse watching companion Phil Hart) during the partial phases, to try and capture the moon passing in front of the sun, and perhaps catch some sunspots.

Slightly before totality I’ll be taking the filter off and using one of my favourite new features of the 5D3 – seven shot auto exposure bracketing – to shoot continuously through totality using a cable release. I want to capture as much detail as possible, so I’ll be taking seven shot brackets with two stops between each photo. That’s a HUGE 14 stop dynamic range. I intend to merge these shots into a sequence of HDR exposures to make a short animation of totality.

I won’t be able to track the sun through this sequence, but hopefully at 500mm through two minutes, the sun will stay close enough to the centre of the frame to allow me to align the images later with minimal loss to cropping at the edge of the frame. Hopefully I’ll be able to let this camera shoot unattended through totality.

Canon 5D MkII
This is the camera I’ll have in my hands throughout totality. I hope to possibly get two shots, but may only have time for one. My first plan is to take a 360 degree spherical panorama of our observing location during totality. We have booked a very nice holiday house to share between seven of us, which backs directly onto a palm-lined beach. The sun will rise over the water and almost immediately enter partial eclipse. I imagine a panorama of the area, with us watching the eclipse, could look pretty cool. I’ll be using my Canon 15mm f2.8 fisheye and Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic tripod head on a medium size tripod. I can only get three shot AEB on the 5D2, but that should be enough to capture the dynamic range of the scene. With six brackets of three shots around and one up (I think I’ll skip the down shot as that takes extra time) I think I should be able to capture this in less than 30 seconds.

Hopefully this will give me enough time to take the fisheye off the camera and swap it with my Canon 24-70 f2.8L and get a six or seven shot AEB panorama of the low sun in total eclipse through the palm trees. I’m hoping I can get this shot done in another 30 seconds or so, allowing me a minute to actually enjoy the eclipse with my own eyes.

Canon 350D
My first Canon DSLR still has use! I’m planning to put the 18-55mm kit lens on this one, putting it on a small tripod off to the side, and doing a wide field time lapse of us and the eclipse for about 30 minutes either side of totality, to hopefully capture a cool video of the whole event. I’ll use an intervalometer to fire the shutter at a regular interval, perhaps one second. My main concern is getting the exposure to work across the HUGE variation in light – essentially from night to day. I need to check if auto exposure will work sufficiently well without causing too many problems.

Canon G12
This nifty little bridge camera is capable of 720p video recording, and I’m going to set it up somewhere to record real time video of the scene and of us enjoying the eclipse. It’s not really suitable to take photos of the actual eclipse, but the way the world darkens and our own reactions to the eclipse is something I’d love to record, so it will be doing that!

iPhone 4S
Amazingly the camera on my phone is capable of recording 1080p video, and not only that, with the right app and good Internet access (I am told the beach house has wifi), I should be able to broadcast live video of our eclipse experience around the whole world! I am still amazed by the times we live in.

I’m hoping to use the ustream app on the iphone to live broadcast the eclipse, so that all of you can watch along with us. Naturally you won’t be able to see the eclipse itself, but you will see the world go dark and hopefully see and hear our reactions (and watch me work my butt off to get the photos I want!)

I need to do a few tests of live streaming, but with luck at 6:15am Queensland time (Click here to see this time converted to your time zone) you’ll be able to go to my ustream page – http://www.ustream.tv/user/neilcreek – and watch the eclipse live! The eclipse itself is at 6:38am QLD time.

Update – change of plans!

As discussed above, I was planning to use the 5D3 on the 500mm lens to get an HDR time lapse of the eclipse.

Unfortunately, Cannon won’t allow continuous shooting in AEB mode. Once the seven shot AEB sequence has ended, you must release the shutter to start the next sequence. I can’t do this as I need to lock down the cable release so I can attend to another camera. Also, even if it WAS able to shoot continuously, my tests doing it manually show that the buffer won’t be able to keep up!

The solution is to take these photos with the 5D2 running the Magic Lantern firmware hack http://www.magiclantern.fm/ (I’ll swap the 5D3 to panorama duty).

This complex and slightly hard to use upgraded firmware will not only allow me to take a continuous exposure bracketed sequence, it will also let me take 9 shots instead of 7 for a greater dynamic range in the final photos, as well as specifying how often each AEB set is taken, so as not to fill the buffer and slow down the shots – a fatal result when trying to create a smooth animation of totality.

I need to test and test and test this new plan to make sure I can do it under the pressure of totality, but it’s hopefully going to help me avoid what could have been a show-stopping problem!