“The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour.” – Annie Dillard, Teaching Stones to Talk

Dillard’s experience of the 1979 eclipse was very similar to my experience yesterday. I had so much that I wanted to try to capture on camera during the all-too brief 2 ½ minutes of total eclipse. But to complicate things, I was also smart enough to know that I should try to just savor the experience as well, quite apart from my camera and all its wonderful technology. Conflicted. So how well did I do?

I have two vivid impressions burned in my mind around this: one, the moment that I first saw with my naked eye the blossom of beauty as the sun and moon finally fully engaged in their climactic dance. The sky of deep deep indigo blue provided the perfect backdrop for this shimmering surreal dance, and my emotions completely caught me off guard. The second thing I remember is how disappointed I was when the first beam of direct sunlight hit me again, and the climax was over and the dance began it’s slow winding down. It was over. Was that really 2 ½ minutes? Did I get what I had hope for both on camera and experientially?

Once my first ecstatic impression passed, like a well-rehearsed ballerina, I joined the dance through my carefully choreographed moves that I had mentally rehearsed over and over in the days leading up to this moment: first to capture two series of 9 bracketed photos of differing exposure of the corona up close. Bang – 18 photos burned onto my memory card. “Wait I got time, I’ll take 9 more just in case there is something different about the corona that I would regret not having captured.” That took me up to 27 shots tightly zoomed in. Now I needed to quickly transition to the second movement. For this I had to lower my tripod as much as possible, change my zoom from 300 mm to 28 mm, all without bumping the focus ring, and then proceed to take another series of bracketed photos with an old wooden railroad building as foreground. This would ground the dance of the eclipse in my reality, in my physical space, the wooden building – something I could touch and relate to, rather than just capturing a distant solitary event in the heavens. Click, click, click…In all I took 35 pictures during that 2 ½ minutes before I was confronted again with the disappointment of direct sunlight. Even that though provided a couple more great shots as I dared to keep my solar filter off my naked lens in order to capture a few lens flares. (See photo above where the sun looks like a star above the doorway.)

Looking back on those 2 ½ minutes I think I did well with my first opportunity of shooting such an extraordinary event like this. I was blessed incredibly, and I was further blessed, by hearing about the joy that the rest of my family also shared in the experience. We thank the Artist and Creator God for sharing such a beautiful dance with us!