I'm a little surprised to see the extent of the damage in those photos.
People must of left their cameras stopped down and pointed at the sun
for a long time to get things to melt like that.
I shot the eclipse on film using an LX. I removed the finder and taped a
piece of Epson double sided matte paper over the ground glass. I had the
rig pointing at the sun for a good 20 minutes during the eclipse, and
probably about as long when I was testing the setup with the full sun a
few days earlier. At first I wondered if the paper would catch on fire,
but it did not even get warm. I initially planned to stack a couple of
polarizers and maybe some black and white filters on the lens to make
the exposure manageable, but in my tests showed that the filers produced
too much flare. So I shot the eclipse with just an unfiltered lens at
f32 and 1/2000. The image shining through the paper was bright but not
excessively so. I made sure to not put my eyes down close to the finder
at any rate.
I used a Sigma APO 135-400 and a Tokina ATX 400 f5.6 during the eclipse,
and just the Sigma while testing. Just gave the lenses and the LX a good
inspection with a very bright LED flashlight. Nothing melted, nothing
burned. Apertures are fine, the LX's shutter curtain and mirror are
fine. My remaining eye seems unaffected as well. (Just kidding).
Unfortunately the LX's maximum shutter speed of 1/2000 was not fast
enough and aside from a a few images where the sun was cover by clouds
all of the images were overexposed, despite pulling the film. I was
surprised that there was way more flare with the Tokina lens than with
the Sigma.
Mark
Larry Colen wrote:
https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/09/rental-camera-gear-destroyed-by-the-solar-eclipse-of-2017/
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