Although I am not too much into astro photography, I certainly wanted to watch the Solar Eclipse on August 21, 2017, and to take some photos. It wasn’t a total eclipse in our area; we live in Southern California. The last Solar Eclipse I watched was a total one, and I was lucky enough to experience it in my birth country, Hungary, in 1999.
I spent a relatively short time preparing for today’s event. I purchased a solar filter sheet and made a homemade filter for my lens yesterday morning. Then I practiced for about an hour to take pictures of the Sun with the filter on. I had to find the right focusing spot, as well as settings that I could start out with today.
My equipment: Nikon d750 dslr, Nikon 28-300mm lens (set at 100mm), CamRanger (to connect my iPhone with the camera), and the filter. (The CamRanger was not necessary, but made the process easier.) I took all the images at 100mm, because I wanted to be able to record the whole eclipse and not move the camera too many times.
​

Solar Eclipse Photography​

Solar Eclipse Photography Using a CamRanger
​

Live View of the Sun on my iPhone with the Help of a CamRanger
​

Although at the beginning of the eclipse I had to change settings often due to the changing light conditions, I took most of the pictures with the settings visible above.
To bring the different stages of the Solar Eclipse together into one image I used Photoshop (21 layers). I’ve decided not to include the second half of the eclipse in this image, because the Sun would have been too small.