Blinding Light & Dusty Filters: Photographing the Solar Eclipse

If you were in the UK recently, you probably noticed the massive hype surrounding the solar eclipse. For many, it was the celestial event of the decade. I was relatively calm about the whole thing, mainly because I had lived through the legendary August 1999 total eclipse and remembered it being a somewhat understated affair from my perspective.

Back in 1999, I was working high up on the MAN05 floor of the old ICL building in Manchester. Every so often, I’d glance out the window at the crowds gathering on the streets below. The sky turned a strange, eerie shade of twilight, stayed that way for a few minutes, and then normal service resumed. I never even went outside.

This recent eclipse, however, was a bit different—not least because I was working from home, and the peak alignment happened to fall outside of working hours.

Naturally, I decided to head into the garden to try and capture it.

Initially, I didn't think I was going to get anything at all. Dense clouds kept threatening to block the sky entirely, and when the sun finally broke through, my camera equipment simply couldn't handle the intensity. My smartphone camera immediately blew out the entire frame into a blinding white smudge.

Switching to my Nikon DSLR didn't yield better results at first. Even after dropping my ISO down to its absolute lowest native setting (ISO 100) and stopping the aperture down as tight as the lens would allow (f/6.3) to block out maximum light, the sun was still far too powerful for the sensor.

That was when a long-forgotten memory kicked in: buried somewhere in my gear bag was a Cokin ND1024 (10-Stop) Neutral Density filter I had bought years ago.

A Neutral Density filter acts essentially like a pair of high-grade sunglasses for your camera lens. It reduces the amount of light reaching the sensor evenly across all wavelengths without altering the natural colors of the scene. A 10-stop ND filter reduces light transmission by a factor of 1,024—meaning you can drastically cut extreme brightness without sacrificing your shutter speed control.

I slotted the square Cokin filter onto the front element, kept the aperture locked down tight, and fired off a series of shots.

The resulting frame captured the distinct crescent curve of the sun as the moon crossed its path. While I would have loved to extract a bit more atmospheric color or coronal detail (which likely would have required stacking multiple filters or using a dedicated solar glass filter), I was thrilled that a piece of kit pulled from the back of the cupboard saved the day.

Though I must admit: after all that technical effort, the final image does look remarkably like a standard photo of the moon—which feels slightly less impressive to explain to people!

Photography Notes
Location: Home Garden, UK.
Subject: Solar Eclipse & Solar Crescent Transit.
Protecting Your Equipment During Solar Events: Never point an optical viewfinder directly at the un-obscured sun without a certified solar filter attached to the front of the lens. Standard ND filters reduce light for the digital sensor, but focused solar radiation can still damage human eyesight through an optical viewfinder or heat up internal camera components over prolonged exposures.