This is the first time I've ever shot an eclipse and it was a complete learning experience. I traveled to a rest stop of I-75 near Findlay, OH. It's normally a 2 hour trip from my house but because of construction an the number of people trying to get to the same places it took 4 hours to get there and 5 hours to get home. Not only was the rest area full, nearly every parking lot or flat field I saw had tons of people.
I shot with a 500mm telephoto and solar filter. It was a big experiment trying different settings and look at the results. I shot about 300 photos in an hour, many were completely white or completely black along with some that actually came out ok.
After a bunch over or under exposed this was probably my first that was close to ok.
I didn't edit any of these photos so the colors depended a lot on the exposure.
It was hard to focus correctly with the filter. Outside didn't seem to get any darker until it was very close to totality.
Once we got to totality it got very dark outside, like night. I ran into problems right away in that it was too dark to see any of the settings on the camera. I had to use the flashlight on my phone to read the camera.
Once I uploaded the photos to my computer I thought I had totally screwed them up with the bright spots around the edges. Turns out I did ok and those are called prominences where part of the suns surface goes out and comes back. They are so large the earth would be a tiny dot inside the bright one on the bottom of the sun.
The end of totality where the sun starts to show again.
At this point it was enough and most people had already left so I did too, the roads were packed and it took me 5 hours to make what should be a 2 hour trip.
