Great American Solar Eclipse 2017

The solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, was named the "Great American Eclipse" by the people because it was a total solar eclipse that crossed the Continental United States from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast. And it was visible only in the United States on land. It was the first total solar eclipse in the Continental U.S. in 38 years. the last one occurred in 1979 but it was visible from just five states.

The event's shadow touched land on the Oregon coast with the total eclipse beginning there at 5:16 p.m. UTC and left the land along the South Carolina coast at about 6:44 p.m. UTC.

The main event of the total solar eclipse is when the moon completely covers the sun. This only lasted around 2.5 minutes in the 2017 solar eclipse. I traveled 13 hours by car with a friend of mine and spent a year planning/preparing for something that lasted only 2.5 minutes.

We agreed that, for us, the best place to photograph this event was Cherohala Skyway which is a 43-mile National Scenic Byway that connects Tellico Plains, Tennessee to Robbinsville, North Carolina. We arrived at our hotel the day before the event and went out right away to determine where exactly we should be to get the best possible photos. You have so many options when it comes to this kind of event. You can take a wide-angle shot to include some scenery, mountains, nature, etc. But I decided to focus on the stars of the show, the sun, and the moon. It is a spectacular show and since it was my first total solar eclipse, I wanted to photograph the diamond ring effect, Baily's beads, and the sun`s corona perfectly.

On the morning of August 21st, we went to our spot which was a parking area towards the middle of the 43 miles skyway. People were already started to come in and prepare their equipment, telescopes, cameras, etc. I had my Nikon D810 at that time and Nikon 200-500mm lens. You need special filters to prevent your camera sensor from burning since you point your camera directly at the sun. UV filters, ND filters are useless. I set up all my equipment and waited for the show.

The partial eclipse started at 01:39 pm when the moon touched the edge of the sun. From there, I had more than an hour to be ready and check my camera, check my settings, check everything again and again until 03:03 pm. It is an extremely stressful situation because you have 2.5minutes to shoot as much as you can. You can miss your focus, you can miss camera settings, you can miss your composition because while you are shooting, the sun and the moon are also moving away very fast towards out of the frame. If you miss one thing, year-long preparation, 13 hours drive and hours and hours of wait will be for nothing and you will have to wait years to get the same chance.

I adjusted my focus, I adjusted my camera settings manually because I didn`t want the camera to decide to change something in the middle of the eclipse. Also, I needed to do bracketing to be able to capture every detail. My camera settings were: 1/320s - f/8.0 - ISO200 at 480mm... The moment the total solar eclipse started, I started pressing the remote shutter release of my camera continusly. Taking bracketed shots, each bracket had 9 shots. Closely observing my viewfinder to make sure the sun and the moon stayed in my frame, I was able to take 4 bracketed photos, a total of 36 shots in 2 minutes. When the total eclipse passed, everybody was cheering and applauding with excitement. I checked the shots I took and they looked perfect. I sighed in such relief.