Great American Eclipse

I just arrived in Almaty, Kazakhstan for another photography tour, but the day I left home I was able to photograph the eclipse from the top of a parking structure at the airport in Nashville. I thought I was going to be the only one there photographing, but I was wrong. There had to be about 200 people doing the same thing. It was an interesting challenge. The first thing I realized was that I couldn’t use a tripod because the sun was overhead at 1:30pm, and I couldn’t point the camera and long lens straight up. Therefore I had to hand hold the 500mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconveter. I also quickly realized that even with a partial eclipse, 1/8000th of a second, 100 ISO, and f/45 still produced an image that was too bright. I needed an ND filter or polarizer, which I didn’t have. At first I was afraid that there were too many clouds in the sky and during totality I might actually miss the best part. It turned out to be perfect, though. The total eclipse was glorious and fully visible. In addition, I was able to photograph the partial eclipse through the edges of the clouds where the reduced density permitted a view of the moon covering the sun. I had never seen pictures like this and I thought they looked pretty cool. I shot on manual exposure mode and varied the exposure with both aperture and shutter until I liked what I saw on the LCD monitor. I’m attaching two photos: One showing the partial eclipse seen through the clouds, and the other one or two seconds before totality.