I used to work with a cinematographer named Rob Draper (Halloween 5, The Spitfire Grill). He was having me practice one day by shooting a product shot for a whisky bottle. I had set the bottle up in front of a seamless backdrop and put a light in front of the bottle at about a 45 degree angle. Rob came in to see how I was doing. His first comment was “What made you put the light in front of the bottle rather than behind the bottle?” I hadn’t really thought much about it. “Why wouldn’t you put the light behind the bottle and bounce in a little light for fill on the front side?” he asked. And that was when I was first introduced to “Reverse Key Lighting”.

Reverse Key Lighting is also called “short lighting” or “narrow lighting”. The idea is that the key light is placed behind the subject rather than in front (the way you would probably see it set up in most cinematography books). In the world of news and interviews its sometimes called a “reporter sandwich” because of the way the reporter is sandwiched by the light behind him and the camera in front of him. Its a very versatile technique so lets take a look at some examples.

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You can watch the first episode here:

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You can purchase it on their eBay Store and at Samy’s Camera in Los Angeles.

Here are a few pointers on how to shoot the sun the next time a Solar Eclipse happens.

Now first of word of warning… shooting the sun could be potentially dangerous to both your eyes and your camera’s sensor. Make sure you are fully familiar with the settings on your camera before attempting and know that you are shooting at your own risk. The following information is geared towards shooters with DSLR cameras but can be used by people shooting any kind of camera.

The Lens

The first thing to remember when shooting any astrophotography is that the stuff in space is REALLY far away. Really, really far. You need a BIG lens to make the sun or moon take up an reasonable amount of screen real estate.

The above image was taken on a full frame sensor (Canon 5d MkII) on a 180mm lens. Smaller sensors like APS-C will show a larger sun disk. Consider at least a 150mm and above lens when shooting solar eclipse.

Now here’s where we can run into potential dangers – having a large lens like that is like looking at the sun with a magnifying glass. And if you’ve ever burned ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass, that’s potentially what you could do to your sensor (and your eyes).

Put on the shades

I popped this Redrock Micro Matte box on the front of my camera so I could use a 4×4 0.9 ND filter in front of my lens. ND filters are like sunglasses for your lens – they cut out light evenly (neutrally) on all colors and they are an absolute must when shooting the sun. This 0.9 ND filter I have in this set up drops the light coming into the lens by around 3 stops which means the light enter is halved 3 times (or 1/8 – or 12.5% – hence the .9)

As an experiment I put a 4×4 circular polarizing filter in the second tray of the matte box. This created strange solar flares (double exposures).

The second filter was flaring the light in a strange way, I’m not sure if it was the polarizer or just a lens flare type artifact. If you see this type of artifacting, you may want to experiment with the types of glass in front of your lens.

If you don’t have these filters – you could rig something up with ND gels – just make sure to double them up over and over again to cut down more light from the sun.

Exposure

Stop it down! I turned the aperture on lens all the way down to f22 – the second smallest aperture available on my Nikon lens. Do this before you attempt anything else because it’s the first step to limiting the amount of light coming into the camera sensor. Why the second smallest? Well I was trying to avoid Lens Defraction which can reduce the sharpness of your shots in high f-stop photos. To be fair, I didn’t really experiment with many f-stop values.

Secondly turn your ISO to the lowest setting. You are after all shooting the brightest spot in the sky.

Third – set you shutter speed for the proper exposure. Depending on how powerful your ND filters you will probably shooting in the 1/4000th of a second or higher. The shot above was taken at 1/8000th of a second.

AVOID LIVE VIEW
As a filmmaker, I use the Live View on my HDSLR all the time, but in this situation it is best to avoid it. Live view flips up the shutter and leaves the sensor unprotected from the sun’s rays. You can use Live View to quickly check your focus but there is a possibility you could burn out your sensor if you stay in Live View for an extended amount of time.

Instead, use the mirrored viewfinder to check your framing. Even with the ND filters and aperture all the way down, it was still mildly unpleasant to look into the viewfinder (but not dangerous). I could have worn sunglasses myself to check the framing.

Fix it in Post

The problem with all these exposure techniques to shoot a solar eclipse is it really makes the sun look like the moon – gone is the blue sky background and the sun becomes a white disk… that’s just not that interesting to look at.

So I took the shot of the sun and color corrected it to make it appear a little more yellow. Then I overlayed the images (in my case a timelapse) on top of a picture of a twilight sky and changed the blending mode to “Add”

Add some new-age trippy space music and you’ve got a neat little video of the a solar eclipse!

Have fun but stay safe.

Using a wrench to tighten those nuts would be advisable…

Here’s a link to the Monofroto Head” they used

See more instructions Here

Every time I go to my nephews’ soccer games and see all the parents with their cameras on “green mode”, or attend a sporting event and see spectators using their flash from a quarter mile away, it makes me grit my teeth. It’s all I can do to stop from walking up to them and fixing their camera for them.

This morning, I got to thinking. If it is painful for ME to see these cameras being mistreated, imagine how the camera feels! Canons have feelings too, ya know? (Nikons happen to have more, but let’s not get into that).

The readers of this site tend to be a bit more knowledgeable about photography than your average shutter snapper, so I wrote this one with the more advanced photographer in mind.

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