14/08/2026
Emley Moor Mast Eclipse
My feed is full of incredible photos of all manner of things featured in front of the eclipse - ballet dancers, stunt bike riders, paragliders, cathedral spires etc. In every case the photographer describes it as one of the most difficult shots they’ve ever taken. Months of detailed planning, finding the perfect location, the right altitude at the right time with the right access, practising the settings , and having mere seconds to pull it off. In all cases the shots I’m seeing were the successful ones.
Well, this was the challenge I set myself months ago. Could I get a timelapse of the partial eclipse rotating around the basket of Emily Moor Mast so that it was perfectly balanced and perfectly centred on the mast?
The answer sadly was no, not quite. After a perfect dry run the night before, the actual eclipse didn’t go quite to plan. Firstly, there was a total lack of hazy cloud which I was relying on for the ‘glow’ which makes the silhouette stand out. Second, I had miscalculated the exact moment of ‘balance’ and should have been standing 5m to my left and about 3m back. And finally, in the panic of the moment, I forgot to change from the bright settings I was using to frame the shot to the much darker settings I needed to properly expose for the sun’s disc. As a result my beautiful 30 second timelapse of a perfectly exposed partial solar eclipse turned into a horribly blown-out 4 second comedy disaster. I was gutted.
It’s taken me a few days, but I’ve now managed to post-process the individual photos to a point where the sun isn’t as gaudy and explosive as it was at first, and I’ve used a clever technique called frame interpolation to create some shots inbetween the ones I actually took, and this is the result. It’s still a very long way from the piece of art I had intended to create, but I think it’s ok, and not bad for an amateur.
Nikon ZF, 400mm, F8, ISO100, 10s shots through a 16-stop solar filter (should have been 1/30s, every second).
