NEWS: Chasing the Solar Eclipse

Unless you've been living under a rock, there's a fair chance that you noticed the excitement that gripped the nation on Wednesday 12th August as the UK experienced a 97% partial solar eclipse. It's not very often that we get the opportunity to capture such an event so I wasn't going to let this historic moment pass without at least trying to capture a photo or two. So, like so many photographers across the UK and Europe, I pointed my camera towards the skies and waited for the celestial magic to unfold.

Now shooting pictures of the sun isn't as straightforward as you might think. In fact, it can seriously damage your camera's sensor if you get it wrong. Your camera's sensor is no different to your own eyes - in order to protect it from permanent damage, you need to place some very, very dark glass in front of it to vastly decrease the amount of light that makes it through to your camera. For this, I use not one, but two ND1000 neutral density filters which provides effectively 18-stops of light reduction - that's just 0.0004% of light reaching the camera's sensor!

Armed with my trusty Nikon D850, I used the very handy PhotoPills smartphone app to calculate the best place to be to capture the sun as it moved through the eclipse cycle. I'm pretty pleased with how my shots came out, even if we didn't get treated to the 'money shot' effect - the full-on solar corona visible in countries like Spain.

You can view a timelapse video of the shots I captured opposite. I overlayed an unobstructed shot of the sun at 5% opacity so you can see how much of the sun is eclipsed by the moon!