Hey everyone, just an update to my last post from Sunday night.
The eclipse went off without a hitch -- thankfully, I am not personally capable of interfering with celestial events -- and I have to say, nothing could have ever possibly prepared me for the experience. No photo has ever actually captured what I saw Monday afternoon. I don't think any of them have come close.
Picture of my own attached for total lack of effect.
As I looked down at my camera screen and watched the last light of the crescent Sun disappear from my view, I felt totality occur. The umbra of the Moon swept over me while I looked down, and the world got noticeably chilly. The wind died down. The world was silent for a hiccup. I immediately and excitedly looked up, and I think my brain broke.
Hovering in the sky over Potato World was an black, alien orb, surrounded by a thin ring of brilliant white and pink shimmering fire. It was something straight out of a science fiction movie, and not necessarily a good one, either. It looked so incredibly fake.
It looked downright cartoony.
And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I wept as I stared at it, completely unable to maintain composure. I gawked at how bright the solar corona actually was -- I had completely expected to have to strain to see it. I marveled as I realized I was seeing, with my own two, naked eyes, solar prominences arching over the limb of the Moon. And I just sobbed through the whole experience.
My fiancee, whose interest in this had seemed to be primarily a mix between modest curiosity in a significant natural and cultural event and support for my interest, also cried at seeing it, while her son sat on the ground with his mouth hanging open.
It was both the longest and the shortest 3 minutes of my life. When it was over, I just stood in the field in a daze, periodically pressing my camera's shutter button. In just a few minutes following the end of totality, the field, in which hundreds of people had gathered, was nearly empty. Only a handful of us remained, and most of the others had heavier equipment than my DSLR and tripod.
At the end of the day, I didn't quite get the pictures I wanted. I had hoped to get bracketed exposures during totality, and I had assumed that my camera's settings for that when using the LCD display as digital viewfinder would be the same as when using the optical viewfinder, and they weren't. But I'm not too fussed about it. The pictures still turned out significantly better than I could have hoped for.
I'll be posting the rest of my photos -- including some pictures of Potato World itself -- to my PixelFed account, which can be found here, if anyone's interested: https://pixey.org/i/web/profile/384533916920271164
Yeah, my photography issues were similar, re: unfamiliar context. I'm still puzzled as to why the quicksetting menu works totally differently when using it in mirrorless mode. But oh well. There's always... 2044?!?!? Oh, crap.
I admit, other than a better lens with a tighter view, the bits of equipment I really wished I'd invested in were a tracking motor and a shutter remote. I paid zero attention to my camera during totality, but I still had this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I should check my centering, and I didn't need that.
To potentially save you the confusion I had, the next popular one in North America will really be 2045. They're both in August, but the 2044 TSE is a relatively short, northerly event with totality ending in Montana at sunset. Meanwhile, 2045 is more akin to the 2017 path, passing from California to Florida.