Aloha!

Yesterday was a special day for most visitors to the Hawaii Islands as Hawaii was the only state in the US that was able to view the annular solar eclipse.  I had the pleasure of being on A Date With Hawaii tour with Ric Dragon, the CEO of DragonSearch and Author of Social Marketology during the mid day show.  Thank you Mother Nature for making our Hawaii adventure tour that much more special!

The dark strip in the center indicates the best locations for viewing the eclipse. Here, the Moon moves centrally in front of the Sun.
The eclipse is also visible in the areas that are shaded red, but less of the Sun’s disk is obscured. The fainter the red shading the less of the Sun’s disk is covered during the eclipse.

How did I take the shot?

The moon did not fully eclipse the sun for its Hawaii audience, by 4 pm the moon had trekked most of its journey and was ready to turn back.  Ric and I

were at Kewalo Bay, near turtle bay at this time.  We were fortunate to have passing cloud cover to filter the brightness of the event, but the Hawaii sun is still incredibly bright.  In order to be able to capture the photo below I used my Sigma 70-210 zoom lens and stacked  -2, -4, and -8 stop neutral density filters onto my Cokin filter holder.  This brought the light down to a more than tolerable level and we could look directly at the sun though the camera.  This photo was captured zoomed all the way to 210mm, at ISO 640 (I was taking photos of the giant banyon tree in the woods and didn’t stop to change my ISO to 100) f29 for 1/800 of a second.  I’m told it looks like a heart.  I thought it looked like a bat.

 The Solar Eclipse

[Please feel free to share this image on your social platforms and use it on FB cover photos and such. ]