For a brief moment, the sun, the moon, and I were in alignment. I was there, prepared, and these are my photos of the event.
Preparing for the Eclipse
The First Attempt
Preparing for this event started back in October of 2023. I was in Houston, and learned that an eclipse would be passing over south Texas in just a few day’s time. I was really kicking myself for not being prepared and being in the path.
I went to B&H to see what filters they had for eclipse photography, and I found a bunch of 16 stop neutral density filters that blocked ultraviolet and infrared radiation. I also learned that the PolarPro Summit filters that I use met these requirements. At the time, I had a 10 stop and a 6 stop filter, so I just planned on stacking them.
On the day of, I found a parking garage and setup my tripod. I enabled bracketing, manually focused, and started shooting. In Houston, we only saw about 85% coverage of the sun. I did not have eclipse glasses, and it was always too bright to look at. It does dim, but it’s a very gradual process. However, at peak coverage (for Houston) it was then obvious how much dimmer it was than normal.
This was good practice because the changing conditions did require changing the exposure. I really leaned on the histogram to gauge this, and it was reliable. Throughout the event, I did over and under expose just to see how those would turn out. Over exposed was terrible as the entire sun was clipping, but under exposed did appear to yield more detail. However, this was detail that was recoverable with some minor edits with the exposing to protect the highlights.
Preparing for April 2024
Fortunately, after the 2023 eclipse, I was pumped to learn of the total eclipse coming close by just 6 months away. I started looking into AirBNB’s in the area and quickly found that they were charging over $1000/night. I switched to hotels, and found one reasonably priced just east of Austin, so I booked it. It was nice to have that out of the way because a few weeks later a friend was doing the same search and found no results.
Next was gear. One effect I did have in my images from the first attempt was some ghosting. I did buy a 15 stop ND filter to eliminate that. I also purchased the 2x teleconverter. I know many believe teleconverters are bad because they degrade the image quality too much. I wanted to try it out, anyways. I took many test shots of many different subjects in different lighting conditions and pixel-peeped like there was no tomorrow. If I’m being honest, I don’t have the best trained eyes, and I don’t have experience with many other systems to compare against, but I was happy with the results. I found images to be sharp, and I liked the additional reach. The smaller apertures didn’t bother me, either. I do believe 800mm was a great focal length for shooting the eclipse. I also purchased some typical cardboard eclipse glasses. Coolness factor aside, being able to look up was useful.
A few days before the eclipse, we did our grocery shopping so we could pack a cooler and be self sufficient on the day of.
The Eclipse
The Weather
As the calendar approached April, my attention turned to the weather. Many websites posted weather forecasts, but this wasn’t based on any real information. One thing I love about living in Houston, is having Space City Weather. That team does a fantastic job of interpreting the data and providing real information. They’re honest when confidence is low, and they also call out bogus predictions when the data isn’t there.
That rant about weather predictions was due to the fear and frustrations weeks prior to our trip. Fact is, the closer we got, the better the forecasts got, the worse the news got. Of learning of the grim forecast, I immediately became an armchair meteorologist.
The prospects weren’t good.
Since I’m unable to affect the weather, I started searching and marking possible viewing locations like city and county parks. My goal was to have a plethora of options so on the day of, I could see where the best weather was and head to that general area.
The Day Of
Monday morning started at 5:00 AM. We had a 2 hour drive ahead of us, and we weren’t sure what kind of traffic we would encounter. We’d also be competing with typical Austin commuter traffic, too. My girlfriend was not appreciative of the early start.
Based on weather, it looks like we’d have a shot in Lampasas, which had a nice downtown park area, so that’s where we headed.
Traffic was thick, but not bad, and once we got to Austin and headed Northwest, things really cleared out. The more we drove, the light started to come out, we got further into Hill Country and it was a quite pleasant drive.
We made it to Lampasas with no drama. The park was quite empty, but people had been camping there overnight and we were far from the first on the scene. We were able to secure a picnic table and setup for a long day. I walked around the park. Here’s a shot of the creek and foot bridge.
Then it was just waiting for the eclipse, which was to start in early afternoon. As time got closer, I setup my equipment, did some test shots, confirmed focus and exposure. Then with about 10 minutes to go, it was all eyes on the sun.
By this time the park was packed. There was no more parking, and people were everywhere. We were situated next to a family from Alaska.
It was an incredible day and a brilliant experience. I do recommend it if you’ve not had the chance before. Traffic was terrible on the way out, and we waited until the moon had passed completely by. Fortunately, I found back roads and wasn’t having to do deal with the stress of it all.
When we got back to the hotel, I did a quick first pass on my photos to share with friends and family.
Weeks later I finally got around to a more thorough culling process and creating my composite.
