Ummmm…
Hi…
………………..
This is a little late…
Only by a month… or two…
The events in this post have taken a toll on me.
As you can see, the photo is of the eclipse.
You’re thinking, “How could it be that bad? You saw the eclipse!”
Well, let me explain.
STORY TIME!
We drive 3 hours out to the middle of nowhere outside of Indianapolis.
The plan goes back all the way to the last eclipse.
My sister and I vowed to see the next one.
I spend days going over the path, trying to find the perfect spot.
I had to be away from people.
The city, houses, anything.
I found this one road that had no houses.
It was just a dirt road connecting two other roads.
IT WAS PERFECT.
We just had to wait seven years.
Every time the calendar said April 8th, I’d go over the plan.
Building up the equipment that I would need.
I didn’t have a solar filter for the camera the first time, but now I do.
Getting a better camera, so on.
Eventually, we got to March 2024.
It took a second to dawn on me, I was going over the plan like always and it hit me…
WAIT!
HOLD ON!
IT’S A MONTH AWAY!
THE TIME HAS COME!
WHAT?!!?
Wait, what am I doing?
What’s happening?
WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN!?!?!
Anyway, I panicked for a bit.
I spent the next month going over what I wanted to do.
I had this huge plan.
Multiple cameras, multiple photos, all remotely activated.
But as we got closer to the date, I decided to scale things back.
I want to actually see the eclipse and not a bunch of cameras.
All I wanted was one photo.
Vertical, me looking up at the eclipse.
That’s it.
That’s all I need.
The day finally arrived.
It’s time.
We drove three hours down to the road I spotted.
No one around.
Just us, a dirt road, and the sun.
The one thing I didn’t plan on was POWERLINES.
The place was so remote that Google Street View hasn’t driven out there.
The power lines were right in the camera view for the photo.
The videos were zoomed in past them, so that wasn’t an issue.
I’ll just have to photoshop them out of the photo, no big deal.
We got there twenty minutes before totality.
I got everything set up and we waited.
On the horizon, we could see this dark mass moving toward us.
It was the moon’s shadow.
THIS IS IT.
It got colder and colder.
Suddenly, the sun was gone.
After seven years, here it is.
I almost got lost in the moment and forgot about the photo.
I went to shoot it and noticed an issue.
I didn’t realize how dark it would get.
The photos you've been seeing are screenshots from the GoPro that I had rolling the whole time.
It was DARK.
The issue was, if I exposed for myself, you couldn’t see the eclipse.
And if I exposed for the eclipse, you couldn’t see me.
I was running out of time and went with exposing for me, but a little under-exposed.
Doing it this way, using camera raw should allow me to pull down the brightness of the eclipse and see it better.
Looking at the GoPro video, you can see me shoot the photo in the last thirty seconds of the eclipse.
Here it is…
Is it the best photo?
No.
But I’m glad I scaled back my plan for multiple photos.
I would have missed all of them.
The sun popped back out from behind the moon and that was that.
It was over.
After all this time, seven years of waiting, it was over.
I got back home and reviewed the media.
That’s where the disappointment started.
I had two cameras zoomed in on the eclipse.
One had this cheap zoom lens I got off Amazon.
It didn’t have any stabilization built in and it was windy out there.
So, the video is just shaking.
Not only that, but there was also dust and dirt on it so there were spots everywhere.
Oh well.
It was just a backup camera.
I had the new camera zoomed in recording in 4K!
That video will look great.
…….wait…..
Where’s the video…..
It was recording, then I stopped it to shoot that photo of totality that was earlier in the post…..
Wait…..
Oh no…..
I DIDN’T HIT RECORD AFTER THE PHOTO.
I DIDN’T RECORD THE ECLIPSE….
IN 4K…
WITH THE FANCY CAMERA.
…………
I hate everything.
I hate it.
NOT ONLY THAT!
But that photo of the eclipse that I shot wasn’t even a full photo.
On my old cameras, when I stop recording and shoot a photo, it’s a full photo.
Full resolution, camera raw, all that.
HOWEVER, this new camera has two modes.
If you shoot a photo in video mode, the photo will only be in 4K resolution and no camera raw.
That’s what I did.
So that nice photo of totality is basically a screenshot from the video that wasn’t recording.
Not full res, no camera raw.
I’M ANGRY.
I hate it.
I failed.
That’s it.
I failed.
Waited this whole time to fail.
……………
As you can tell, I wasn’t very pleased.
That’s why this post is over two months late.
I hated everything about it.
But at least I still have that one photo, right?
That was the main goal, after all.
Just that one photo.
That is true.
After I settled down, I started to work on the photo.
Because it was dark, there was a lot of ISO noise everywhere.
The photo was grainy.
Luckily, Photoshop has new AI noise reduction.
That helped a lot.
I removed the powerlines and then started on the eclipse.
Camera raw worked, but not enough.
Here’s version one of the photo...
I showed it to the Aunt, who was there for the eclipse.
She wasn’t sold on it.
So, then I made a new version.
I took the one “photo” I had of totality and slapped it in the photo.
She liked that one a lot better.
But then I was torn.
This is also why this post is so late.
I couldn’t decide which one to use.
Everything I do is mostly in-camera.
I don’t cheat things that often.
That is why I liked the original photo.
It’s how it looked in-camera.
You can tell I was there.
With the photoshopped one, I could just shoot a photo of me looking up at the sky during twilight hours and place the sun in there.
I was torn between having it be authentic to what the camera saw or being authentic to what we saw.
Compare the two below...
On top of all this, I still hated everything.
So, I was stuck.
This project has been done for two months.
Photo, video, edited, and ready to go.
I didn’t want to look at it anymore.
I didn’t want to do anything, actually.
I’d come home and just vegetate.
I got stuck there for almost three months.
It was only recently I finally got over it.
How did I get over it?
I… don’t know.
One day, I woke up and felt great.
I was in a mood to get things done.
Before I knew it the house was all clean, I recorded a new ending for the video and made sure that was good, double-checked the photo, and started typing this post.
I wish I had an answer on how to get over it.
People go through these issues all the time and it would be nice to give some advice.
BUT! I have no idea what happened.
Brain sad, brain happy.
ONTO THE VIDEO!
The video obviously covers everything around the eclipse.
Before, the day of, and my grumpiness afterward.
Well, that’s all I got.
Am I sad that I didn’t get all the coverage I wanted?
A little bit.
I JUST HAD TO HIT RECORD.
I DID THE ROOKIE MISTAKE.
Is it the end of the world, though?
Not really.
You can google “Eclipse 4K” and see WAAAYYY better videos than I could have ever shot.
I still achieved my goal and getting a photo but also SEEING IT.
That’s all that matters.
I saw it.
Something not a lot of people get to see.
Anyways, I’m done rambling.
There’s been some interesting things that happened recently.
Neighbor died, almost lost the house, just some little things.
The next post and video will probably be getting all that covered.
See you then!
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