Fotodano. Look. See. Feel.: Eclipse 2012 or "what was I THINKING?!?!"

I've received tremendous response to my Eclipse 2012 album from my Facebook friends.

Thank you all.

Now, if you'll indulge me, I'll share a bit about my creative process with these two images. If not you may click away at any time.

For those who remain, here goes:

I knew I wanted to shoot the Eclipse so I did a bit of planning. Years ago my friend Alan Spiegler shot a comet (I think it was Hale-Bopp) out at Wupatki National Monument. I don't have a copy but, take my word for it, it's an awesome image. Comet, sky and ruins. Perfect. That basic compositional idea is what I had in mind.

I did some map recon at Wupatki and saw that the access road runs just about North/South at the Citadel ruins. That would allow me to put some ruins in the foreground. Also, I shot an azimuth for sunset the day before and it would line up nicely.

I did a little internet research about photographing an eclipse and found that for this type of eclipse I wouldn't need a filter at its peak. That was not quite accurate, at least as far as my gear is concerned. Between ISO, aperture and shutter speed I could not block off enough light to get an acceptable image. Thankfully, I keep an IR pass filter in my camera bag. That brought my exposure into a tolerable range right away. I knew I could get my color back or go B/W in post so the filtered color didn't bother me. I could have set up a custom white balance but I didn't. So there.

The angle, difference in exposure between the sky and the landscape and countless pedestrians all worked against me.

Frack.

I even attempted to put up my speed lights in the ruins via radio trigger but the distance was too great.

Frack.

I was committed to a composite so I focused on shooting the Eclipse.

I short, I bracketed by 2 stops and shot. A lot. A lot-a-lot. Since I knew I was going to seriously crop my actual Eclipse image I played with positioning the Sun in my viewfinder to separate it from the bad sunspots I was getting. I set used auto-foucus once and put the camera on manual. If the sun changed position enough to effect the sharpness of the image, image sharpness would be the least of my problems.

I shot a series of blown out silhouettes of the ruins and stopped once the alien looking woman walked through the frame. I knew I had what I wanted.

I cropped, layered, filtered and converted to black and white all in Photoshop.

So, pre-visualization, planning, happy accidents and Photoshop. That's all it took. Here are the unedited images and a couple of out takes.