Total Eclipse of my Mind.

Here’s a real pro tip, never show up for a shoot doing something you have never done before. Oh, I wished I had listened to that advice 🙂

I decided to break out the 150-600mm Sigma Art lens with a 1.4x converter for this occasion (I forgot my nice Canon 300mm with a doubler).

While it’s a fantastic lens it is HEAVY! The ball head on my tracker kept slipping since I was aiming nearly straight up and instead of being smart and just swapping that out I switched to a standard tripod without tracking and used its heavier ball head since the eclipse was about to begin. 

I reset the center point of the tripod multiple times and as we entered totality the intervalometer decided to lock up once I removed the solar filter. 

Not sure what happened but had to turn the camera off, disconnect the intervalometer and then manual press shoot. I manually increased the ISO up and down to get the brighter and darker pics then plugged back in the intervalometer with the light from my cellphone and shot more. So I missed most of the eclipse visually but at least didn’t have an epic fail, just a fail.