Partial Eclipse

Have you ever made plans way in advance and weeks before the plans you realized you goofed? Well I goofed. Last year the wife and I made plans to go on a Caribbean Cruise. We chose Royal Caribbean Allure of the Seas for a second time in so many years. Really beautiful ship. We liked our trip so much last year we booked the ship again only with different destinations. But I digress…. The goof comes in not checking with the Celestial calendar of events first….joking. This one went right past me. I did not realize until about a month before we were to board the ship that the once in a lifetime Celestial event was happening around Nashville TN only 40 miles from my home. Couldn’t make last minute changes. So I decided to deal with it in the best way I knew how…..accept the fact I goofed…I did and I frantically went on a search for a Solar filter for my Canon EF 70-300mm IS USM lens. The only thing I could find at the time was a 4″x4″ Thousand Oaks Optical Mylar Solar Filter. I thought well I am going to make the best of it and I did. I managed to get all of my gear including my Slik Pro400DX with Slik AF1100E ball head aboard ship ready to go. 2nd goof….unless you are using the tripod on the ship to take pictures of a subject on the ship it is useless while moving at 16 knots attempting to take photos of an object in sky… So the tripod stayed neatly packed away the whole trip.

Then comes goof number 3….believing technical information given over the internet about taking photos of the sun during an eclipse. 1. The Autofocus will not work-WRONG 2. Focus your lens to Infinity and tape it there in Manual Focus mode – Nope 3. Tripod is a must you can not hand hold the long exposure needed – Wrongo again. By evidence of the photo above.  I tried ALL 3 of these suggestions and NONE of them worked. So I stopped and went with my 40+ years photography experience. Turned on Autofocus, turned on Image Stabilization, put canon EOS 80D in Manual Exposure mode, Set ISO at 640, Lens at 300mm f5.6, Shutter at 1/1250 and from the 8th deck Of the Allure of the Seas Central Park area, I hand Held the Camera while the ship was making a tad over 16 knots in 3-6 foot seas….and got the photo above. Along with image stabilization My body compensated for any movement of the deck. I took a series of 62 photos all but 4 came out….the first 4 I took using internet suggestions…….. So the moral of the story. Go with your gut. Let the Camera do what it does best and you do what you do best. A combination of Auto Focus and Image Stabilization and Manual Exposure control allowed me to take these photos.