May 20, 2012 - IMG_9404

This total annular eclipse was a rare treat for us living in the western United States. Since I have never seen a total eclipse and I was so close to the "totality belt," I opted to head north to Lake Tahoe for the event. For these close up images, I used a sheet of mylar wrapped around my "bigma." The result was a more detailed and well defined exposure of the eclipse. In some of my closer frames you can actually see the sun spots on the surface of our great star! Only problem with this method was that along with blocking out 99% of the suns UV and visible light, the mylar took pretty much all color with it. The fix was to warm up the RAW version quite a bit in ACR. Then I stacked these five exposure onto one frame in the sequence and orientation that the moon passed by the sun.