I was rather ambivalent at first about the Big Eclipse. At least, from the standpoint of a photographer – because I was pretty sure that everybody in the path of the moon’s shadow would have some kind of camera turned toward it, and there would be roughly 357 bajillion trillion photos of the eclipse posted on the Internet within minutes of the totality. What could I possibly add to that?
But as the date approached, I started to get an idea: rather than aiming a well-filtered camera at the sun itself, I was curious what effect the darkness would have on the Nashville skyline.
So I staked out a location at an overpass just north of town, put one of my cameras (Olympus OMDs) on a tripod to record a time lapse, and left the other to maybe shoot the corona once the totality began. I mean, OK, why not 357 bajillion trillion plus one?
So much for my “once in a lifetime” experience…
Well, that plan got thwarted. While most of Nashville and the surrounding area was blessed with relatively clear skies, at the spot where I was set up, the eclipse was itself eclipsed, by clouds. This photo was taken about 2 minutes before the “2nd contact” (beginning of totality), and shortly after, the cloud closed in completely.
But once the darkness descended at 1:27PM, I picked up camera number two and started shooting toward the skyline.
I had noticed that the way I’d set up the time-lapse, with a constant exposure value, once the darkness started settling in, the manually set exposures went pretty much completely black. So with the second camera, I exposed for the diminished light, and the result is the photo at the top of this post.
And here’s the time-lapse. It just gets dark…