Preparatives
Usual preparation for such a far trip includes collecting all the administrative documents (passport, visa, insurance) and subscribing to one of the Eclipse-City program which my father all did very well for me. We also needed to train for taking THE picture that would catch the unique moment.
Training for a UNIQUE picture
Naively, I wished one could take a picture of me with the eclipse in the background. This kind of picture is easier to imagine than to take !
After asking some eclipse specialists, it appeared that this take was going to be delicate.
Indeed, the ambiant light would probably remain insufficient or almost null to take a picture of my face correctly exposed in back-light !
Several experts suggested we should train by taking photos of myself with the moon in background, since it offers almost the same conditions as an total eclipse. Simple tests proved we should necessarily light the person with a torch .
Even if the moon rose late the days before the trip, we managed to test taking some pictures using different setup with a non-reflex digital camera but providing a relatively complete manual mode : A PENTAX Optio MX (thanks my godfather).
 Moon is too bright, person unsharp and badly lightened (30mm F/3.9 1/125eme ISO400) |
 Moon OK, Person unsharp, badly lightened (30mm F/3.9 1/300eme ISO400) |
 Moon OK, Person almost sharp but badly lightened (22mm F/4 1/200eme ISO400) |
 Moon bright, Person almost focused, better lightened (22mm F4 1/50eme ISO400) |
 Moon too bright, Person almost focused, well lightened (22mm F/4 1s ISO400) |
 Moon OK, Person focused very badly lightened (22mm F/8 1/125eme ISO400) |
 Moon rise OK, Person focused, almost well lightened (17mm F/3.6 4s ISO100) |
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It seems obvious we had to make a compromise if we wanted to capture both the person and the eclipse focused: Close-ups are not possible because the depth of field is limited by a necessarily large aperture size.
The person should be placed far from the camera to be focused even with a infinity focus. Fortunately enough, the totality occurs at the low altitude of 15 degrees and let it possible to take the person on an eclipse background almost horizontally.
We still had to plan several shoots with multiple settings of the exposure time to be sure catching one correctly exposed take.
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