Capturing the Total Solar Eclipse with Canon Explorer
Keith Ladzinski April 1, 2024
0 Comments
The Moon's shadow will be sweeping across the United States on April 8th in a highly-anticipated total solar eclipse event. Canon Explorer of Light, Keith Ladzinski, a National Geographic Photographer and Emmy nominated director, shares his tips & tricks for all shutter bugs out there to capture the moment of a total solar eclipse, forever.
Choosing a Camera Just about any camera will work to capture a solar eclipse, but some will produce a better experience depending on your expectations. Canon's EOS R series of cameras will probably be the camera of choice for photographers looking for the highest image quality and most equipment flexibility. Choosing a full-frame sensor camera like the EOS R5 or EOS R8 can produce high resolution images with low noise. APS-C frame cameras such as the EOS R50 or EOS R100 will benefit from the smaller APS-C sized sensor due to the 1.6x crop factor. The smaller sensor produces a cropped image compared to the uncropped full-frame sensor. Your sun disk will be significantly larger with the APS-C sensor than with the full frame sensor.
Choosing a Lens Choosing a lens to photograph the sun or moon depends on how large of a sun or moon disk you want. The size of the disk is controlled by two things: your mirrorless camera's sensor size and the focal length of your lens. You should be looking for a sun disk 1/3 to 1/4 the height of your sensor. A 400mm focal length like what you'd get from the RF100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM Lens produces a 1/4 size sun disk on an APS-C sized sensor. If your plan includes shooting a time-lapse sequence of the entire 2.5-hour solar eclipse with a horizon or other foreground feature, you will be using some very wide angle lenses like the RF15-30mm F4.5-6.3 IS STM Lens.
Canon RF100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM Lens
Choosing a solar filter Solar filters can transmit or restrict different wavelengths of light. Non-silvered glass and metalized Mylar produce a blueish-white sun disk while professional silver/black polymer solar film produces a yellow sun disk.
A truly safe filter for viewing and photography should have a CE or ISO certification and goes over the front of the lens, this includes the rear filter tray when using super telephotos. There is a difference between solar filters used by the public for viewing the solar eclipse and photographers photographing the solar eclipse. Some are saying that ND filters that restrict 14 - 16.5 stops of light are safe.' These may be safe for photography use only but not for direct viewing. Restricting the light being passed through a filter is only part of the story. A safe filter for photography and viewing also restricts infrared and ultraviolet light beyond 800nm. Neutral density filters don't do this. Not having a solar filter or having a plain ND filter can burn a hole not only through the sensor of a camera, but also melt the aperture blades too!
Choosing a Tripod and Head Many photographers use their tripods reluctantly. In the case of the upcoming total eclipse of the sun in April, it's a must. The eclipse is almost 2 hours long and your arms will be exhausted if you don't use one.
Make sure your tripod can support more than what your camera, lens and tripod head weigh. Consider a tripod with four-section legs (versus a three-leg tripod) if you are travelling - four-leg section tripods fold up smaller and fit in suitcases easier and are often the same height as three-leg tripods when fully extended. Make sure your tripod comes up to eye-level, without fully extending the center column, because your lens will be pointing almost straight up, and you won't want to hunch for over two hours to see your LCD screen. You can also bring a camping chair to sit in.
More important than the type of legs you buy, it's the tripod head that counts. Unlike typical photography, you won't be aiming your camera and lens more-or-less straight ahead. This is a morning to midday event in most of North America, and you will be aimed almost straight up to photograph the sun during this eclipse. That's not something many tripod heads are designed to do, let alone with a large super-telephoto lens mounted. There are many types of heads that are usable, but the most preferred for this purpose is an astronomical equatorial head, gimbal head, and ball and socket head.
What to do when the eclipse happens There are two parts to a total eclipse. The partial phases occur as the moon begins to partially cover or uncover the sun's disk. Throughout this phase, you have the full intensity of the sun visible and need an actual solar filter over the lens. As the moon progressively covers more of the sun, there will be a point where only a small piece of the bright sun remains visible, and surrounding the moon is a bright ring of light from the sun. This is sometimes called the diamond ring effect. If you want to successfully photograph this conclusion of the partial phase, leading up to eclipse totality, you'll need to remove your solar filter and then photograph it. But be extremely careful, without a solar filter in place, the direct sunlight - even from just a small segment of the sun - can be damaging.
Baily's bead of a total solar eclipse is seen in Chonqing, China
About 15 seconds before totality, you can remove the solar filter to photograph the remaining diamond ring effect, and about five seconds before totality, there are still a few tiny rays of sunlight peeking between the valleys of the craters on the moon. This creates what has been named Baily's beads, after English astronomer Francis Baily. Once the moon completely covers the sun, after Baily's beads, totality has begun and you are photographing the corona. Totality during this ecli
Most recent headlines
02/01/2025
NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0, continued to advance in 2024, with some notable developments and renewed hopes that a deregulatory-minded Federal Communications Commi...
02/01/2025
Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly the hottest topic in the tech industry today, displaying all the excitement, apprehension and hype of the early days of t...
02/01/2025
STAMFORD, Conn. NBC Sports said 2024 was its best year in terms of ratings since 2016. Its success was fueled by the Paris Summer Olympics as well as its NFL co...
02/01/2025
MSG Networks has been dropped from Altice USA's Optimum-branded pay TV offerings after the operator and the regional sports provider were unable to reach a ...
02/01/2025
How color film and analog color TV works with bluescreen / chromakey
Graham Quince January 2, 2025
0 Comments
A deep dive into VFX History looking at ...
02/01/2025
Hulu Series Interior Chinatown Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton January 2, 2025
0 Comments
Colorist Aidan Stanford delivers complex gra...
02/01/2025
Bulk Font Replacement in Premiere Pro
Andy Ford January 2, 2025
0 Comments
If you want to change the font of multiple text layers in Premiere Pro, the...
02/01/2025
Streaming media's impact on the media and entertainment industry continued to widen in 2024, as more sports rights moved to streaming platforms and the rapi...
02/01/2025
ATLANTA The board of directors for Gray Television Inc. has unanimously voted to change the company's name to Gray Media, Inc. effective Jan. 1....
02/01/2025
Official television and film archives exist to preserve the history and creativity of media. But even these formal institutions do not contain everything that h...
02/01/2025
Welsh succeeds Renard Jenkins, who has reached the end of his two-year tenure in the role
By Jenny Priestley
Published: January 2, 2025
Welsh succeeds Ren...
02/01/2025
Creator Economy Isn't Really Like Film/Show Entertainment
Andy Marken January 1, 2025
0 Comments
Come on Barry, you're good at this sort of s...
02/01/2025
Blackmagic Design Announces New Lower Price for Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera ...
02/01/2025
Hollywood Lighting Hacks: Big Looks, Tiny Budget
Sean Alami January 1, 2025
0 Comments
Discover how to create stunning Hollywood-style lighting using ...
02/01/2025
Comscore Appoints New Chief Marketing Officer Measurement innovator taps TV, streaming and digital ad veteran Jackelyn Keller for brand and product marketing e...
02/01/2025
A fresh start to 2025 with new faces, familiar voices and plenty of Irish music ...
02/01/2025
GeForce NOW is kicking off 2025 by delivering 14 games to the cloud this month, with two available to stream this week so members can get started on their New Y...
01/01/2025
Marcy Lefkovitz, Dalet SVP product innovation, details the findings of the companys report into the future of newsrooms, including leveraging AI, optimising mul...
31/12/2024
Rashad Frett shares a moment with Michelle Satter at the 2023 Directors Lab. Pho...
31/12/2024
What's Ahead in 2025? OWC's Larry O'Connor Offers Some Bold Predicti...
31/12/2024
Blackmagic Design Announces New Features for Blackmagic Cloud
Brie Clayton December 31, 2024
0 Comments
New thumbnail icon view, clip metadata inspect...
31/12/2024
5 Features in DaVinci Resolve You're Not Using (But You Should Be)
Kasia Jarco December 31, 2024
0 Comments
In this video we are going to talk abo...
31/12/2024
Back to All News
NFL Christmas Day Games on Netflix Average Over 30 Million Global Viewers
Entertainment
31 December 2024
Global
Link copied to clipboard
...
31/12/2024
Back to All News
Squid Game' Season 2 Smashes Top 10 Records as Millions W...
30/12/2024
Leaving Thomson after 21 years, former Managing Director David Quin reflects on a career spent navigating the shifting sands of global media development. From r...
30/12/2024
[Pictured: a still from Love Lies Bleeding, one of the 100 Sundance-supported titles that opened to wider audiences in 2024]...
30/12/2024
Digital Domain Creates Groundbreaking VFX for Venom: The Last Dance, Bringing ...
30/12/2024
Internet Giant GMP Builds Tokyo Virtual Event Space with URSA Broadcast G2
Brie Clayton December 30, 2024
0 Comments
Blackmagic URSA Broadcast G2 and ...
30/12/2024
Renderboxes launches Photon, a no-compromise transportable high-performance work...
30/12/2024
Shinobi II Monitor Supports Canon, Sony, Nikon - Touch to Focus with New Feature...
30/12/2024
30 Dec 2024
In a Groundbreaking Agreement, VEON and Starlink to Bring Starlink ...
30/12/2024
The pace of technology innovation has accelerated in the past year, most dramati...
29/12/2024
Gyeongnam Culture and Arts Foundation (GCAF), an active promotor of cultural and artistic diversity, has chosen Ikegami UHK-X700 camera chains for integration i...
27/12/2024
After starting 2024 with hopes that the transition to streaming might finally produce a more stable, profitable businesses, the media and entertainment industry...
27/12/2024
Broadcasters ended the year with hopes and fears about how the federal government will regulate the TV industry in 2025. While the incoming Trump administration...
27/12/2024
NVIDIA's AI Podcast gives listeners the inside scoop on the ways AI is transforming nearly every industry. Since the show's debut in 2016, it's gar...
26/12/2024
Talking about artificial intelligence in 2024 is akin to talking about the internet in 1994 everyone's excited about it and thinks it will have an enormous ...
26/12/2024
Back to All News
Netflix NFL Christmas Gameday Reaches 65 Million US Viewers
Entertainment
26 December 2024
GlobalUnited States
Link copied to clipboard
U...
26/12/2024
Back to All News
Check Out All the Must-See Trailers From Netflix's NFL Chr...
26/12/2024
Back to All News
Beyonc Delivers Epic Gift of a Halftime Performance "Beyonc...
26/12/2024
Back to All News
Get in the Game With Squid Game' Season 2 Complete Coverage Guide
Entertainment
26 December 2024
Global
Link copied to clipboard
Are...
26/12/2024
This GFN Thursday wraps up another incredible year for cloud gaming. Take a look back at the top games and new features that made 2024 a standout for GeForce NO...
24/12/2024
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) is calling for applications from South African film and television filmmakers to be part of the NFVF's delegat...
24/12/2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. The Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau said Paramount Global is being fined $244,952 for violations of emergency alerting rul...
24/12/2024
NEW YORK Carnegie Hall's video-streaming channel, Carnegie Hall+, said it will celebrate the holiday season by offering a wide selection of holiday-themed o...
24/12/2024
LOS ANGELES PlayersTV, an athlete and fan-owned media company, has announced the acquisition of Cloud Media Center, an AI-driven sports adtech and media distrib...
24/12/2024
The Best Playlists of 2024 The top playlists we created in 2024, from dad rock to dembow.
By
Tara Bellucci
December 23, 2024
Image by Kelly Davidson
Tak...
24/12/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, softwa...
23/12/2024
At IBC2024, Grass Valley CTO Ian Fletcher told attendees at GV Forum that broadcast is now an IT industry. During our discussions at the show, TVBEurope heard v...
Capturing the Total Solar Eclipse with Canon Explorer 
