There are a few things I learned on my trip that in retrospect are totally obvious.
1) Make sure my sensors are all clean before the totality, not when I get home and find spots on my once in a lifetime photos.
2) Make sure that all of my gear is in tip-top shape before I leave. Setting up for the eclipse I was having trouble with my K-3 not reading the aperture data off the bigma, also the bigma was just slightly loose on the mount. When I checked it today, one of the screws on the back mount of the bigma was loose.
3) Bring every camera body I own. and extra tripods. I had room to bring my second K-3, I could have set it up on a tripod with an interval timer and just automatically gotten photos of the scenery etc. throughout the eclipse (like that awesome shot Darren got).
4) A ballhead that is good enough for landscape work isn't necessarily good enough for photographing the sun. With the camera at that steep angle, once I tightened it down, things would still flex, which meant aiming took a lot of time.
5) the internal interval timer only goes down to one frame per two seconds, not one frame per second. I should have used an external interval timer, or possibly bracketed three shots every three seconds.
I made the mistakes in 2017 so you don't need to in 2024. -- Larry Colen [email protected] (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
