How I Shoot It #6: Partial Solar Eclipse Using Micro Four Thirds

Hello everyone, today I'm back with another "How I Shoot It" post. This time I want to share a bit of astro-photography that I do sometimes with Micro Four Thirds. As you know, recently there's a Solar Eclipse that happened here in Indonesia last week, and I photographed the whole thing from start to finish.

So here you go, the partial solar eclipse pictures:
      

    

     

 

   

 

   

 

   
As you can see, I took a whole bunch of sun pictures on that day, and although I can't really get any detail out of the sun, I'm quite happy with the result. All of these pictures are taken using my Panasonic GX7 and Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm f/4.0-5.6 G Vario lens, with a bunch of some others stuff that I will mention later.
  

Camera Settings

f/5.6 at the beginning of the eclipse when it's still early in the morning, f/8.0-f/11.0 at the peak of the eclipse, and f/16 at almost the end of the eclipse, when the sun is bright. Shutter speed is always around 1/4000 or 1/8000. ISO is always 200, can't risk 100 because of the lack of dynamic range at that ISO for the GX7, which you will need to recover some detail from the sun should the light gets unpredictable.
   

IMPORTANT! I used 10-12 stops worth of ND filters to cut down the light entering the camera. The particular ones that I used were the Lee Big Stopper 10 stop, and a couple of Hitech 2 stops graduated ND. YOU WILL NEED TO USE ND FILTER, or some other type of light blocking device, or even A PROPER SOLAR FILTER. OTHERWISE, YOU COULD RISK DAMAGING YOUR CAMERA SENSOR WITH SUCH BRIGHT LIGHT, EVEN WITH F/22 ISO 100 1/8000S!!

   

This is my GX7 with the 100-300mm and the multiple ND filters that I attached to get a reasonable exposure setting on my camera. Hardcore stuff, isn't it? :p

  
I zoomed all the way to 300mm(that's 600mm full frame) using the GX7, and I sadly had to shoot JPEG because I need to use the 2x and 4x digital teleconverter, which unfortunately only available in JPEG. If your lens can get longer than 600mm eq, you won't need to shoot in JPEG. Always shoot RAW for situations like this!
  

Technique

Tripod! ND Filters! Ultra long telephoto lens! You can still skip the tripod if you feel ballsy, but don't skip on the other two when shooting solar eclipse!
  
Actually, there's not a lot of technique being involved here, it's all just about getting the right exposure and nailing the focus. I use single AF on the GX7 and it worked well. You just have to point the AF point to the contrasty edge of the sun's periphery to get a lock on the sun.
  
Composition wise, fill the frame. Crop if you need too, use digital tele-converter if you must, get as close as possible to filling the frame. Afterwards, you can always fill the frame with negative space later on in the post, because right now you want to "savor" as much of the sun to fill up your sensor, so you won't regret it later.
  
Keep in mind, the earth is rotating, so you'll see the sun "moves" from the east to the west slowly(in fact it's the earth that rotates). This effect gets very pronounced especially when you are shooting with an ultra long telephoto lens. Therefore, be ready to follow the sun and catch it in your composition. Lock your camera down in a tripod, and move the head slowly everytime the sun is at the edge of your frame.
  
Post processing, add some contrast and clarity to the file until you can clearly see the sun spots. The sun spots are the black spots on the sun's surface. At this point you are shooting at small aperture and you will risk showing dust on the sensor, and both dust spots and sun spots look almost the same. The only way to know which one is which, is by shooting the sun multiple times while changing the framing a little bit. If the spots are moving as you move the framing, then they are the sun spots. If they don't move, they're the dust spots, clean them using clone tool.
  

How to improve?

This is one of the situation where gear really matters. I really wish I have the highest megapixel count that I can have, I really wish I have longer lens, I really wish my ND filters aren't eating a bit of the sharpness, gear gear, gear, gear! Laugh at me, call me gear nerds, but you're shooting at the limits of what our cameras can do, and at this point gear does matter.
  
I also wish I was shooting this from the city where I could see total eclipse instead of the partial eclipse that I encountered in my city. But if I did so, I'll have to make a bet that the weather on that particular city will be cloud free at that time. I was about to make the call and go to Palembang city so I can get the total eclipse from there, but fortunately I made the right choice by staying here because it was super cloudy during the eclipse day.
  
I could improve the composition a bit by adding a foreground which will be silhouetted for sure, like the first photo on this post where I put leaves and branches of a tree as my foreground. Unfortunately, as the sun went higher and higher, I need to get closer to the tree to get the leaves and branches as my foreground, and if I focus on the foreground, the sun will just turn into a giant white blob that doesn't look like an eclipse. I tried focusing to the sun, and the foreground just disappeared into a messy grey mist in front of the sun. So it didn't work at that time, but I could try with branches or leaves that are more far away. Or I could probably use a faraway building's rooftop too.
  
That's all for today's post. I hope you enjoy this post, and stay tune for more! Cheers and God bless you!