91%

This is not some political statement about voting intentions of the number of fascist scum prevelent in the news, much as at the moment it is a trial not to rant. It’s the coverage of the recent partial eclipse in Leeds, and likely the most I will now get to see in my time.

27 odd years ago, as some may be aware were were blessed with an eclipse reaching totality in the south of England, to which many made a pilgimage to the event. It seems as is sometimes the case were they were cursed with cloud, more irritatingly until the day I was in Caen, also within the totality line and blessed with clear blue skies. Our host however wanted to go to a party in a monastery in Brittany, where it was both out of the totality line and, yuou guessed it, cloudy. At least the party was banging.

Anyway, we had approximately 91% in Leeds and a clear sky. About 15 years ago I tried photographing a partial eclipse, and at the time felt somewhat dissapointed with the results. In retrospect, the clouds on that day were a good thing, photography-wise as it enabled me to use an ND8 filter and actually get some scenery. I shot some long lens shots with the solar filter, anyway as before in the last one a year or so ago. Obviously the extent of these makes it rather more exciting, but the do just end up as shapes in a black field. I forgot the ND8 filter…

Even with super fast speeds and taking the exposure compensation down to -7 stops, the sun was so bright even at 91% coverage that you cannot really see the occlusion. However the light was very nice and I had a bit of fun with these with the fisheye on the Fuji XT-30 which captured the park nicely. I shot using the standard preset and to Raw – some of these are processed from the jpegs and some from Raw as I realised after the the standard windows import will not import both – it imported some of the jpegs and some of the raws. But I had some fun with multiple layer masks in Lightroom.