After months of planning, filming, testing, travelling, shooting and considerably more time in Photoshop than I would like to admit, it is finally out.

The short film Prince Berkoh and I have been working on over the past months has officially been released, together with the final artwork that started this entire project in the first place.

And before you read any further, I actually have one request:

Watch the film first. Come back here afterwards.

There are things in the film, and particularly in the way the final image is revealed, that I don’t really want to explain before you’ve had a chance to experience them. The film was never intended to be a tutorial or a documentary explanation of how a solar eclipse works. It was created as something much more interpretive: an attempt to convey a little of the anticipation, uncertainty and emotion surrounding an event that neither Prince nor I had ever experienced before.

This letter is the other side of that story.

Here, I want to take you behind the final artwork: where the idea came from, why I chose to separate its different components, how the landscape was photographed, and why combining seven panoramas captured under radically different light turned into one of the most complicated post-processing exercises I’ve ever undertaken.

So, if you’ve watched the film, let’s get into it.

Prince and I first met in Peru in 2024, while I was working on The Shot Above.

I remember feeling comfortable around him almost immediately. He has an energy that makes it very easy to forget there is someone behind the camera, which is probably one of the most important qualities I can ask for from someone filming me.

I’m very conscious of cameras when I don’t feel comfortable with the person operating them. I behave differently. I become aware of what I’m saying, what I’m doing, where I’m looking. And inevitably, something gets lost.

With Prince, that disappeared very quickly.

I also enjoy his sense of humour—which may sound completely irrelevant until you spend two weeks travelling, filming and working ridiculous hours together—and, most importantly, I already knew how talented he was.

So when the opportunity came to create a film around this eclipse project with Nikon, asking Prince felt very natural.

There was, however, one fairly fundamental problem:

Neither of us had ever experienced a total solar eclipse.

And that became the starting point for the film.

Rather than pretending we knew what totality was going to feel like, we decided to make the film about pursuing something we didn’t yet understand.

In the months before Spain, I had listened to people who had experienced many total solar eclipses. Again and again, I heard essentially the same thing: you can understand the physics, look at photographs, watch films and prepare as much as you want, but none of it really explains what totality feels like until you experience it yourself.

So that became the thread.

We didn’t want to tell people how an eclipse should feel. We wanted to create our own interpretation of the experience and hopefully open a small window onto it for someone who has never stood beneath one.

And because the photograph itself was always going to be a creative interpretation rather than a documentary representation of one instant, it felt right that the film should have that same freedom.

Prince and I developed that together, and he then had the rather unenviable job of translating it into images while I was simultaneously trying to prepare for the most technically demanding two minutes of photography I’d ever attempted.

But before any of that could happen, I needed a landscape.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted mountains.

That’s hardly surprising if you’ve followed my work for any amount of time. I am naturally drawn towards altitude, exposed terrain and landscapes that carry a certain scale.

But I didn’t want to choose a mountain simply because it provided a convenient foreground for an eclipse.

This was a Spanish eclipse. I wanted the landscape to retain something of the country it was happening in, while remaining within the path of totality and fitting the visual world I am naturally attracted to.

Eventually, and with the help of BegiBakar, we found a mountain landscape that felt right.

Getting there required a hike that wasn’t particularly long, but became increasingly steep towards the top, with a fair amount of scrambling near the summit. With a heavy photography backpack, that always becomes an interesting exercise in balance.

Once there, though, the view was exactly what I had hoped for.

And this is where the slightly unusual methodology behind the final artwork begins.

My idea for the final image wasn’t simply to show the progression of the eclipse across a static landscape.

There are already many beautiful eclipse sequence photographs that do exactly that.

I wanted time to affect the entire image.

As the eclipse progressed, I wanted the light to change. I wanted the colours to change. I wanted the landscape itself to move through different states alongside what was happening in the sky.

And this particular eclipse gave me an unusual opportunity to push that idea further.

Totality happened very late in the day. Sunset and night followed quickly afterwards, and all of this happened around the peak of the Perseid meteor shower.

Suddenly, the progression I had in mind could extend beyond the eclipse itself.

Daylight could move towards totality. Totality could move towards sunset. And sunset could eventually disappear into night.

That was the image I wanted to make.

But there was an obvious practical problem.

During the eclipse itself, I was already operating two photographic setups. One Nikon Z8 with the 400mm was dedicated to the close-up sequence, while another setup was capturing the wider environment. We were also filming the eclipse at 600mm at the same time.

Adding a multi-frame panoramic sequence from a mountain summit—and repeatedly photographing that panorama as the light changed—would have made an already complicated operation unnecessarily difficult.

More importantly, it would have made it harder for me to do any of those things properly.

So I separated them.

I think this distinction is important.

The final artwork is not a documentary photograph of one instant. And it’s rarely the case with the work I do.

It is a creative interpretation of the eclipse and the passage of time surrounding it.

But the relationship between its elements isn’t arbitrary.

The landscape sits within the path of totality, and the eclipse passed in alignment with that landscape on 12 August, though slightly further left. The celestial position isn’t something I simply moved somewhere because I thought it looked better.

What I separated was when and how I collected the material.

For the eclipse itself, I photographed both the detailed progression at 400mm and the wider sky. Those wider frames became particularly useful afterwards because they gave me a visual reference for how the sky, colour and atmosphere actually evolved around totality.

For the landscape, I needed something different.

I needed time.

The landscape shoot began before sunset and continued through the changing evening light, into darkness, and eventually into the following morning.

The basic process sounds simple:

Put the camera on the tripod.

Photograph a panorama.

Wait for the light to change.

Photograph it again.

And again.

And again.

In practice, there was one fairly significant requirement: every panorama needed to be as close as possible to the one before it.

For each sequence, I had to rotate the camera through essentially the same positions, trying to maintain the same degree of rotation from the first panel to the last.

The closer I could make those individual frames in the field, the greater the chance I had of aligning everything properly afterwards.

Because ultimately I wasn’t trying to choose one panorama.

I was trying to make several different moments occupy the same landscape.

From everything I photographed, I eventually selected seven complete panoramas as the foundation of the final artwork.

The versions you’re seeing here have been processed individually for illustrative purposes, so they aren’t intended to represent the exact colour treatment of the finished artwork. I’m showing them because I think they’re the easiest way to understand what I was actually trying to combine.

Look at how radically the illumination changes between them!

That’s precisely what I wanted.

It was also precisely what made the next part so difficult.

In my head, I had a wonderfully logical post-processing plan.

Reality had other ideas.

For simplicity, imagine that each of my seven panoramas contains a series of individual panels: frame 1, frame 2, frame 3, and so on.

My first approach was to take frame 1 from all seven panoramas and load those seven files into Photoshop.

I would auto-align them and then manually refine the alignment until they sat as close to pixel-for-pixel as I could reasonably get them.

Then I would do exactly the same thing with every other position in the panorama.

Frame 2 against all the other frame 2s.

Frame 3 against all the other frame 3s.

And so on.

It was slow, but it actually worked surprisingly well.

Even though the photographs had been captured under completely different lighting conditions, I could get the corresponding panels very closely aligned.

Great.

The idea was then to stitch one complete panorama in PTGui and use that stitching solution as the basis for the others.

That was where things started falling apart.

I struggled to get the first panorama to stitch exactly the way I wanted.

Even after adding control points and spending a considerable amount of time refining it, there were areas that weren’t resolving cleanly enough. I knew I could manually correct some of those problems afterwards, but when the entire purpose is eventually to blend seven different panoramas together, small inconsistencies become very large problems.

My hoped-for workflow—create one perfect stitch, then reproduce that geometry across the remaining six—wasn’t giving me the foundation I needed.

So I changed approach.

Instead of aligning the corresponding individual frames first, I went back to the original RAW files and stitched all seven panoramas independently.

Then I brought the seven completed panoramas into Photoshop and tried to align them on top of one another.

That created another problem.

Panorama software makes tiny decisions differently from one stitch to another. Even if the camera was positioned extremely carefully in the field, the resulting projection, distortion and placement aren’t necessarily identical across seven independently stitched panoramas.

And “nearly identical” isn’t quite enough when you’re trying to transition seamlessly between radically different states of light.

The automatic alignment got me somewhere.

Just not somewhere I wanted to build the final image from.

At this point I had spent a lot of time trying to make seven complete panoramas conform to one another.

So I tried almost the opposite.

Instead of constructing each panorama from photographs captured at the same moment, I took different panels from different moments.

Frame 1 from panorama 1.
Frame 2 from panorama 2.
Frame 3 from panorama 3.

And so on, across the seven selected states of light.

Effectively, I was asking the panorama software to stitch photographs that were progressively moving through completely different colours and illumination.

I had very little confidence this would work.

Some frames were captured before sunset. Others were moving towards darkness. Others belonged to completely different light altogether.

Somehow, it worked.

Not perfectly—and certainly not as the finished artwork—but remarkably well.

For the first time, I had a coherent structural foundation in which the passage of time was already moving spatially across the landscape.

That became my starting point.

From there, the real blending work began.

And this was probably the most complicated part of the entire image.

The challenge wasn’t simply to hide seams between photographs.

I was trying to make radically different states of light and colour coexist inside one coherent landscape.

If everything blended too smoothly, I would lose the very thing I was trying to show.

If the transitions were too obvious, the image would feel fragmented rather than continuous.

So there was a balance to find.

I wanted you to be able to move through the image and feel that something was changing—to recognise that the landscape at one side doesn’t belong to quite the same moment as the landscape at the other—without the photograph breaking apart into seven separate sections.

That required a lot of manual work.

Masks were refined repeatedly. Transitions were rebuilt. Colour relationships changed as neighbouring sections changed. Tiny alignment differences that seemed irrelevant when looking at one panorama suddenly became obvious when another state of light was introduced beside it.

And throughout all of this, I was also using what I had photographed during the actual eclipse as a reference.

Not because I wanted to reproduce it literally, but because I wanted the interpretation to remain connected to the phenomenon that inspired it.

The eclipse created extraordinarily strange light.

That’s one of the things photographs of the Sun itself don’t necessarily communicate. The event isn’t only happening up there. The entire environment responds to it.

And that was really the point of the artwork.

To show an eclipse not simply as a sequence in the sky, but as a transformation of time, light and colour across an entire landscape.

The final part of the image was something this particular eclipse made possible.

Night.

Because totality happened so late, I didn’t want the visual story to stop immediately afterwards.

The landscape continued changing.

The remaining colour disappeared from the sky. Darkness arrived. Stars became visible.

And above us, the Perseids were active.

That gave me the final transition I had imagined when I first started developing the project: not simply daylight into eclipse, but eclipse into night.

That small element in the nighttime portion of the artwork is part of that continuation.

It isn’t there simply to add another astronomical object to the image. It marks the fact that the sky didn’t stop when the eclipse ended.

The event belonged to a much larger night.

And after spending so much time thinking about a phenomenon lasting less than two minutes, I liked the idea that the artwork could keep moving after totality was over.

There is always a slightly strange moment at the end of projects like this.

For months, the image exists almost entirely in my head.

I can plan it. I can calculate alignments. I can scout terrain (or have Prince do it 😉 ). I can test equipment. I can build spreadsheets and workflows and imagine how different pieces might eventually fit together.

But until the material actually exists, I don’t know whether the idea will survive contact with reality.

This one nearly defeated me in post-processing. And not many people to whom I pitched the idea thought it would actually give anything.

There were several points during those first two failed approaches where I genuinely wasn’t sure whether I would be able to make the panoramas work together in the way I had envisioned.

And perhaps that’s why I’m particularly happy with where it ended up.

It isn’t a photograph of a single instant.

It was never meant to be.

It is a photograph about what happens across time.

About the way an eclipse changes not only the appearance of the Sun, but the environment beneath it.

About daylight becoming something unfamiliar for a few minutes before continuing towards darkness.

And about trying to fit an experience that unfolded across hours into one frame.

The artwork was the reason this project began.

But I’m very glad it eventually became more than the photograph.

Prince took an idea that was already deliberately interpretive and helped me find a way to carry that same philosophy into the film.

That was something I cared about from the beginning. I didn’t want to make an artistic image and then surround it with a film that suddenly became purely explanatory or documentary.

The two needed to belong to the same world.

Prince understood that immediately, and I’m enormously grateful that he was willing to take on the challenge—not only of filming the project, but of building something creative around an event neither of us could fully anticipate.

The film became our shared interpretation of the pursuit, while the artwork became mine of the phenomenon itself.

And I think they make much more sense together than either would have alone.

This entire project was created in collaboration with Nikon, who trusted us with an unusual amount of creative freedom from the beginning. I’m extremely grateful to Maria and the wider Nikon team for allowing the project to develop into what it eventually became, and for supporting an idea that was never going to fit neatly into a conventional eclipse photograph or film.

There are also many people who helped me prepare for the eclipse itself and whose experience became invaluable along the way. Some of those voices even found their way into the finished film. You can seen or hear them at the end.

And, of course, thank you to Prince—for saying yes to another slightly unreasonable project and then spending months helping me turn it into something real.

If you’ve been following the project since August, you’ll know this isn’t the first thing I’ve written about it.

My previous letters were much more about photographing my first total solar eclipse: the months of testing, the exposure strategy, what changed on location, what worked, what didn’t, and what it actually felt like when totality finally arrived. Followed by the letter written by Mikel on editing my RAW files to come up with an astonishing HDR close-up of totality.

There are also a few articles and interviews being released around the project that approach it from slightly different angles—some more technical, some more focused on the film and the collaboration behind it.

I like that.

There was never really one story here.

There was the technical challenge of photographing an eclipse for the first time.

There was the experience of totality itself.

There was the film.

And there was this image, quietly sitting behind all of it for nearly two years as the thing I originally went to Spain to make.

Now, finally, I can show it to you.

With the artwork finally released, the pre-sale for The Shadow Between is now open.

The artwork is available as a limited edition of 30 individually numbered and hand-signed prints across four sizes, accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity and personal letter.

The last time I opened a limited-edition pre-sale, the entire edition sold out within a few days. If you would like to secure one from this release, you can now find all formats, prices and details below.

And with that, I think I can finally call this project complete.

Thank you for following the journey, for reading these very long letters, and for giving the work the time and attention that goes far beyond simply seeing the final image.

I hope you enjoy The Shadow Between.

Until next time, and wishing you clear skies.

Angel