The Eclipse

 

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Fringe programming for the following special report:

The weather forecast was dicey: partly cloudy, a chance of showers. Some friends who have a country house between St. Clair and Sullivan hosted a big viewing party. It was an ideal location. Clouds started to pass by before the eclipse began, creating anxiety. Then it cleared, leaving nearly perfect conditions. The experience was mystical.

The pink-purple spots at about 1 and 4 o'clock in the first photo are Bailey beads, sunlight refracted around mountains and valleys at the moon's edge. The color shows the presence of helium when run through a spectrograph and proved the existence of that element in the sun.

We heard that you could use a kitchen colander like a multi-eyed pinhole camera. It works.

 

Mass Transit

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There are a lot of email photography news letters and tip sheets around the Web and I get more than I can read. However, one that came through yesterday morning got my attention. The author urged us not to buy expensive solar filters for our lenses and definitely not add to the mountain of pix that will be on the web today, fuzzy images of a yellow bowl of soup with a pea floating across it. The recommended alternative was to get the atmosphere of the whole scene, local weather permitting.

It was a glorious day in Missouri. As recommended, I shot at f 22 (which creates the starburst effect), ISO 400 to darken the area around the sun and let the camera set the shutter speed. This was taken a few minutes before sunset, looking across the school yard near my house. There's a dot in there somewhere.

By the way, kids, don't try this at home, even if you're looking through I-don't-know-how-many lens elements and a viewfinder's pentaprism very late in the day. Leave the job to seasoned semi-professionals like me or you might end up like the character below, depicted on a shirt for sale at the Gypsy Caravan.