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Originally Posted by geoffsims
Hi Alex,
WOW - this is fantastic! The totality shots are just superb, and as others have said, the music is great too. As is evident from the stills you have posted earlier, I really love the HDR technique on the widefield landscape - the focal length is perfect too, to show the landscape as well as a decent sized Sun/Moon.
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Thanks, Geoff.
I agree, 35mm on full frame worked well for the eclipse (and shots with the Moon I did earlier).
Quote:
Originally Posted by geoffsims
Am I allowed to quiz you a bit more on the technique? :-)
- how many shots are in your bracketed sequence?
- what is the interval between sequences?
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Sure thing
.
* 35mm setup was doing 14EV bracket in 2EV steps from 1/4000 to 1s at ISO 200 and f/4 driven by the Promote controller. The bracket was just right - 1/4000 was useful for the diamond ring and 1s - for the totality. Initially I planned to use f/5.6 but seeing the high cloud, I opened the aperture one f/stop. SNS HDR Pro did a reasonable job merging the widefield exposures.
* 14mm setup was supposed to be doing the 9EV bracket in 1EV steps with builtin D3S intervalometer but someone forgot to turn the bracketing on so it was taking nine 1/15s exposures at f/4 and ISO 200. Later I stacked 3 exposures together and was able to reveal the shadows without much noise. My problem was that the interval was set too long - 4 seconds. It turned out to be not a bad technique and I plan to use it for the next eclipse - as little interval as possible at similar shutter speed and then stack a few for each frame in the video.
Quote:
Originally Posted by geoffsims
Also, just a general comment - in hindsight, do you think it's better to bracket and get higher dyanamic range, or use a single exposure (and less dynamic range) to reduce the interval between shots?
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Ideally - both. One HDR sequence with medium wide-angle (35mm) and one ultra-wide with single exposures and little gaps. If I was restricted to just one and had to pick then it would be HDR bracketed sequence because it is so close to the real thing.
What I would do differently though is the long focal length imaging - instead of doing the bracketed sequence there, I would just put the camera in a manual video mode with around 1/250-1/1000 shutter speed and f/6. It would be great to see Baily's beads emerge in video-like footage.