Eclipse Adventure - Part 2

For whatever reason, neither Ann nor I slept particularly well that night.  Still, we managed to get up when the alarm went off at 4 am.  Face it, it wasn’t anything a pot of fresh coffee wouldn’t fix.  So we made breakfast, packed up and drove the mile or so down the road to park at the closed logging road for the hike into our meadow destination.

From the previous day’s scouting, I knew where I wanted to go and what I wanted to photograph.  While the first impression of the meadow is that it’s a typical grass meadow, as you walk through it you see (and feel) these rivers of slate (basalt?) that run through the fields.  They’re like lava flows, but it’s not coarse lava rock, it’s smooth slate.  So I wanted to capture that feeling of flowing rock, and I knew the place to do just that.

I worked my way around that part of the meadow as the sun made its way up into the sky.  Recalling my recent post about vertical images, I told myself to try and make as many horizontal images as possible because it’s good to have diversity in seeing!  Anyway, I’d already made my shot so working on horizontals wasn’t going to deprive me of anything.

Having photographed a bit, I headed back to Beast to get some of the extra gear we brought for the eclipse as the sun started clipping the tree tops.  Gear dropped near where we would use it, my focus turned back to the meadow.  This time I headed to a different corner to avoid the splashes of light as much as possible.  

Not finding any interesting views, and the sun wrecking havoc on landscape images, I did what I often do and looked downwards.  It wasn’t hard to find interesting compositions in the flows of slate.  

Eventually, the sun rose enough to start illuminating the meadow, and I made my way back towards the more open areas.  I wandered over to photograph a very interesting tree, and then cut across the meadow to photograph another set of flowing rocks.

Moving further down the meadow, I climbed over a few mounds to join Ann and found a lovely grassy section to photograph.

And then made my way further down the meadow, again to join Ann, to photograph more river veins through the grasses.

I kinda felt like I was stealing her images, but I know better than that.  She sees differently than I do and her images won't be like mine no matter how close together we are.

The sun finally started to get harsh and, looking at my watch, it seemed time to make my way back to the part of the meadow where we were going to set up shop for the eclipse.

After tromping back to the eastern part of the meadow, I started examining these strange pits of shattered rocks that are largely devoid of life.  Much like the composition earlier in the post, you find life struggling to make its way in the rock seams.

Ann eventually made her way over to the eclipse shooting area and we set things up.  I grabbed my old X-100 to take a few photographs while waiting for the eclipse to start. 

It might have looked like we knew what we were doing, but I won’t kid you, we didn’t.  I’d gone online to get recommendations on what to do and simply put, the advice was was “bracket like hell!”.  Of course they told you exactly what to do, so Ann and I had rehearsed the routine necessary to get that range of exposures the day before the trip.  We also did an oral walk through once on site (later finding out that it wasn't quite as thorough a walk through as it could have been).  Ann and I had different focal length lenses, so we would get at least two slightly different images, and I was hoping to be able to quickly run through a third image with Ann’s long telephoto zoom. 

My original idea was for me to try and do the exposure bracketing with two cameras at the same time, but caution kicked in and I decided it would be better to get one pair of good images and live with that in the event we ran out of time than to mess up both sets on my end and have only Ann’s image.  

Since there was about an hour between the start of the eclipse and totality, I started wandering around with my X-100 in hand.  At one point I saw a giant bug land on Ann’s camera bag and then it flew over to my old tripod right in front of Ann.   She called me over to look at it because it was so strange.  As I approached, she asked me how close my camera could focus and I realized that the x-100 has a macro mode, so I turned on the setting and bent down to check out the bug.  

Looking at it, not only did I realize it was a huge black bug unlike any other I’d seen, but it was doubly odd because it was having breakfast.

I kept trying to get closer after each shot, but as you might expect, the bug eventually wasn’t too pleased and took off.  

I then started wandering around and of course made some compositions.

Every so often I’d stop, walk over to my eclipse glasses and check on the progress of the eclipse.  Some of us look better with our solar eclipse glasses on than others, so we’ll just share this one image.

All the while we were noticing how the light was dimming, because it wasn’t nearly as contrasty as earlier in the morning.  Not realizing just how much the light was diminishing, I had a whole slew of hand-held images that were fuzzy because of the slow shutter speed required to make a photograph in the diminishing light.  With the leaf shutter on the x-100, it’s hard to tell when the shutter seems to be too slow to hand-hold.  

I did some calculations from exposure data from images made at the very start of the eclipse and those (blurry) images a few minutes before totality and there was an 8 stop difference, or 1/250th the amount of light between those images.

Eventually, as totality approached, we removed our lens caps, turned on our cameras, focused, replaced our lens caps and waited.

Totality hit and we started our rehearsed procedure: remove the lens cap, and then me reading out the shutter speed and then firing the shutter, call out the next shutter speed, fire the shutter. 1/2000th of a second, fire the shutter, 1/1000 sec, shutter, 1/500 sec, shutter, 1/250 sec, shutter, 1/125 sec, shutter, 1/60 sec, shutter, 1/30 sec, shutter, 1/15 sec, shutter, 1/8 sec, shutter, 1/4 sec, shutter, 1/2 sec, shutter, 1 sec, shutter - Ann followed along as I called out the sequence so we made sure we were coordinated in what we were doing.

My image:

Then, for safe keeping, backwards again at a fast steady pace, 1 sec, fire the shutter, 1/2 sec, shutter, 1/4 sec, shutter, 1/8 sec, shutter, 1/15 sec, shutter, 1/30 sec, shutter, 1/60 sec, shutter, 1/125 sec, shutter, 1/250 sec, shutter, 1/500 sec, shutter, 1/1000 sec, shutter, 1/2000 sec, shutter.

Ann’s image:

I immediately turned off my camera and unlocked the tripod head lever, turned around to set my camera down and then grab the other, much longer lens, all the while admiring the beauty of the eclipse and the surroundings as I moved back and forth.  I mounted the monster lens, whipped it around on the tripod head, zooming it out to 400mm, and adjusted until I acquired the eclipse - and then got hit with a bolt of light. 

NO! It couldn’t have passed that quickly!

I immediately locked down the tripod head and made a quick run through one full set of exposures way faster than I’d done verbally with Ann.  As I was focused on turning the shutter speed dial and depressing the shutter (using my finger instead of a cable release) as fast as possible, I could tell from my peripheral vision that daylight was returning.  I made 13 images in 10 seconds.

Still, my quick reactions gave us at least something noteworthy, despite the tragic flaws of me not being able to ensure focus and probably having left the optical image stabilization on when it should have been off (or shaking the camera by moving too quickly).  Even so, I managed to capture the diamond that reappeared after the eclipse before the sun came totally blasting out.

And then it was over. 

I was glad that I managed to look around a bit while making the first sequence of images and in-between swapping lenses to enjoy the eclipse; it was simply beautiful.  But it passed by way too quickly.  I can see why people go eclipse hunting.  It’s quite the experience for day to turn to night, then the stunning eclipse, and then the return of daylight.

And return to daylight it does.  It not only seems to return much quicker than it leaves, but when it comes back, the sunlight hits like a hammer.

Ann and I slowly packed up our gear, periodically stopping to put our glasses on to check the progress of the receding eclipse.  By the time we were loaded up and took one last look from the meadow, the moon (or is it the sun) was well on its way out of the eclipse.  We tromped back to the car to have an early lunch and to start our return trip.

As we left Prineville to head up the bluff to take us back to Redmond, Sisters and home, we ran into a traffic jam.  I can’t say it wasn’t expected, but we were definitely hoping for better.

Which, surprisingly, we got once we made it to the top of the hill.  At one point many of the vehicles turned left (I assume the Oregon tags were heading to Bend, the California tags to their home state) and the pace picked up.  At Redmond we saw another line of cars heading south, but few followed us west towards Sisters.  At Sisters, we could see the Sisters Wilderness fires burning on the mountain side.  But the trip back on the McKenzie Highway was no worse than your average Sunday afternoon, in fact, a bit lighter.  Definitely a lot lighter than a holiday weekend.  We made good time getting home.

As an adventure it was grand.  As beautiful as the eclipse was though, the trip was a great reminder that there are beautiful places pretty much everywhere and spending a quiet morning in a meadow photographing can be just as rewarding as seeing a once-in-a-lifetime eclipse.  Fortunately, we got to do both that morning.  And we got to so all alone.  

While we won’t be having another eclipse in the area in our lifetimes, Ann and I are already talking about returning to photograph the meadow.  That will always be there!

Yeah, I would say the eclipse trip turned out as well as we could have hoped!