I'm back. And I'm still processing, in every sense of the word.

Two years of thinking about it. Months of testing. An increasingly ridiculous number of spreadsheets. Rehearsing the same sequence over and over again. Two weeks in Spain. A film production happening alongside the photography. And then, after all of that, less than two minutes of totality.

Within an hour of the eclipse ending, I got sick.

Not dramatically, but enough to be a reminder that what I had just put my body and mind through was genuinely demanding. Three months of specific preparation on top of nearly a year of planning, a trip to Spain, a hike, a shoot, an entire night of editing, and then the body simply sent its invoice and I had to pay for it

But everything that needed to happen, happened. The sky cooperated, the cameras did what they were supposed to do, and I came home with the photographs I had hoped for — including one very particular image that was the reason I started planning this project in the first place.

That one will have to wait a little longer.

For now, I wanted to talk about the eclipse itself, and particularly the close-up photographs I made with the 400mm. Some of these images had to be processed almost immediately after totality for Nikon and the press, which meant that rather than sleeping after one of the most intense photographic experiences I’ve had, I spent the night in front of my computer.

Now that I’ve had a little more time to recover and look back at it, I wanted to share what I learned.

Not as an eclipse expert — this was, after all, my first one — but precisely from the perspective of someone who had to learn how to photograph one from scratch.

And perhaps the biggest lesson is this:

Photographing a total solar eclipse is mostly about what you do before it happens.

I know you have seen hundreds of eclipse images. Possibly thousands. The internet was full of them the morning after August 12th, and I contributed to that pile myself with the close-ups I delivered to Nikon and the press the following morning as agreed. So I'm not writing this to add more images to the noise, at least not yet.

I'm writing this because I think eclipses are genuinely underestimated as experiences, and I say that as someone who had never witnessed totality before this one.

Before going to Spain, I kept hearing the same sentence from people who had experienced a total solar eclipse before:

You can’t really understand it until you’ve seen one.

I was slightly skeptical.

I’ve spent a significant part of my life outside at night. I’ve photographed auroras, the Milky Way, meteor showers and rare celestial alignments. I understand what causes an eclipse, I knew exactly what was going to happen and, after two years of planning, I knew almost exactly when everything was going to happen.

Surely that would take away some of the surprise?

Well… not really.

And I think there’s an important distinction here between seeing a partial eclipse and experiencing totality. They are not variations of the same experience.

If you have never stood inside the path of totality, I genuinely think it is worth doing at least once in your lifetime.

You don’t have to photograph it. In fact, after this experience, I would probably argue that the photograph should be secondary.

Because the strange thing about an eclipse is that something completely predictable can still feel profoundly unfamiliar when you’re standing underneath it.

And that was also the paradox of photographing one: I needed to prepare obsessively precisely so that, when it finally happened, I could spend at least a few seconds not photographing it.

I want to be clear about something from the start: I am not writing this as an eclipse photography expert. This was my first totality. I am writing as someone who prepared as seriously as I could, learned an enormous amount in the process, and came back with things worth passing on.

The preparation started nearly a year before August 12th, and I owe a great deal of it to several people. Dan and Ascen from Capture the Atlas were instrumental in building the foundation of my planning, and their resource on shooting the Spain eclipse is something I would recommend to anyone who wants to go deep on the technical side.

But I also want to specifically acknowledge Alan Dyer and Mike Shaw, two eclipse photography experts who have been shooting totalities for decades. Their guidance, generosity, and willingness to share what they know shaped how I approached this entire project. Without them, I would have walked into Spain significantly less prepared.

Training at home before an eclipse is not optional, it is the work.

You obviously can’t practice photographing a total solar eclipse without a total solar eclipse.

But you can practice almost everything around it.

For months before Spain, I regularly pointed my Nikon Z8 and 400mm at the Sun and ran through the sequence as though eclipse day had arrived.

The timing. Camera settings. Menu changes. Focus checks. Remote triggering. Moving between partial phases, the seconds surrounding totality, totality itself, and then reversing the entire process afterwards.

The one thing you obviously don’t rehearse is removing the certified solar filter. During practice, the Sun remains completely unobstructed, so the filter stays firmly in place.

And that brings me to the non-negotiable part of solar photography: safety comes before the photograph.

Looking at or photographing the unobscured Sun requires appropriate certified solar protection. The same applies to cameras, lenses, binoculars and your eyes. Full totality — when the bright solar photosphere is completely covered — is the very brief exception. As soon as any part of that bright surface returns, the protection needs to return with it.

I also spent a frankly absurd amount of time testing exposures.

I built spreadsheets containing different combinations of aperture, ISO and shutter speed for my exact camera and lens combination, photographed the Sun with them, and then went through the files and histograms individually.

For my particular Z8, I established ISO 100 as my preferred starting point, while ISO 800 gave me another very useful working point when I needed significantly more light without compromising the files more than I was comfortable with.

I settled at f/11 and built the different sequences from there.

I know it may sound obsessive and maybe a little excessive.

But eclipse photography is perhaps 90% preparation. The actual event is far too short to start experimenting.

Here is where preparation meets reality.

The point of practicing isn’t to create a sequence you follow blindly.

It’s to understand your equipment well enough that you know what you can change when reality doesn’t match the spreadsheet.

And reality rarely does.

This particular eclipse happened very low in the sky, close to sunset. Add atmospheric haze, dust and the conditions we encountered in Spain, and the amount of light reaching the camera changed enormously as the Sun descended.

I had initially expected to photograph much of the partial phase around 1/1250 sec.

On location, it became obvious that this wasn’t going to be sufficient.

The difference between the beginning of the eclipse and the second partial phase after totality was simply too significant. So I adapted and began bracketing much more widely than originally planned.

Depending on the moment and conditions, my partial-phase exposures eventually covered roughly 1/2000 sec down towards 1/30 sec, while keeping f/11 as my base aperture and moving between ISO 100 to 800 when necessary.

By the end, the Sun was so low, red and attenuated by the atmosphere that the solar filter itself was blocking too much light for some of what I wanted to record.

That was probably the moment when all those hours of testing became most useful.

I wasn’t guessing.

I already knew how my files behaved at different ISOs and exposures, so adapting on location felt like making informed choices rather than abandoning the plan.

Practice gives you the plan. Understanding gives you permission to change it.

This may be the single most useful technical thing I learned right before the eclipse.

And all credit goes to Dan Stein, an incredibly talented and dedicated photographer and experienced eclipse shooter whom I had the chance to photograph alongside in Spain.

The approximately 20 seconds immediately before and after totality are extraordinarily fast.

Baily’s beads appear and disappear. Prominences become visible. The corona begins to emerge. The entire appearance of the Sun can change within fractions of a second.

Normally, photographers use continuous burst during these moments.

During totality itself, however, you generally bracket, because the dynamic range between the brightest and faintest structures is enormous.

Those are normally two separate strategies.

Why?

Because on most cameras, when you trigger a bracket, the camera records the chosen sequence — perhaps five, seven or nine exposures — and then stops.

You have to trigger it again.

Twenty seconds doesn’t sound short until you’re photographing something that is changing every fraction of a second.

This is where the Z8 and Z9 have a rather fascinating feature hidden quite deep in their menus: they can effectively continue bracketing while bursting.

Instead of having to choose between capturing lots of moments at one exposure or fewer moments across several exposures, I could gather both temporal and exposure coverage.

There was just one problem.

For the feature to remain engaged, an assigned custom button on the camera or lens has to be physically held while the shutter is triggered.

And the last thing I wanted at 400mm during the most critical 20 seconds of the entire sequence was my hand touching the camera.

So Dan engineered a highly sophisticated solution involving…

A piece of plastic.

And tape.

We taped the assigned button down immediately before totality, effectively keeping the function permanently engaged, while I triggered the camera remotely.

It worked amazingly well.

And because I was continuously recording different exposures during those fleeting seconds, I came away with much richer information across Baily’s beads, prominences and the first structures of the corona than I would have had from a conventional burst.

Dan has since passed the suggestion to Nikon USA, and I’ve done the same with the Nikon Europe team: if this behaviour could simply become an ON/OFF toggle through firmware, rather than requiring a button to remain physically pressed, it would make an already remarkable feature considerably more practical.

It’s an incredibly niche use case.

But after using it during an actual eclipse, I genuinely think it’s a game changer.

Then came totality itself.

Here, the problem changes again.

The dynamic range of a total solar eclipse is enormous. You have incredibly bright structures close to the Sun, the pink prominences around its edge, the inner corona, and then the much fainter corona extending considerably farther out.

I wanted approximately 13–14 stops of exposure coverage.

One bracketing sequence couldn’t comfortably give me everything I wanted.

So I used two.

Across those sequences, my exposures extended approximately from 1/2000 sec all the way to 2 seconds, primarily at f/11, with ISO 100 and 800 giving me the flexibility I needed as conditions changed.

And this is where another fairly mundane camera feature became enormously valuable: custom shooting menu banks.

I had prepared the different phases of the eclipse in advance so that rather than changing multiple individual settings under pressure, I could move rapidly from one preconfigured setup to another.

Partials.

The burst/bracketing sequence entering totality.

Totality bracket one.

Totality bracket two.

Then everything back in reverse.

The goal was to make the complicated decisions before I ever arrived in Spain.

Because once totality began, there was something else I desperately wanted to do.

Everyone had told me to do this.

Alan. Mike. Dan. Other eclipse chasers.

At some point during totality:

Stop. And look.

I automated and rehearsed enough of the photography that I could give myself somewhere around 15–20 seconds where I didn’t need to actively operate the cameras.

And those are the seconds I remember most clearly.

Not what appeared on the back of the Z8 but what was in front of it.

During full totality only, while the bright photosphere is completely covered, the eclipse can be safely observed without a solar filter. Looking through the binoculars during that brief window reveals a completely different level of detail.

One of the prominences was so large and intensely pink that we could actually distinguish it with our naked eyes.

But there’s another part of the experience that surprised me.

The people.

We weren’t experiencing totality silently and individually. There were people shouting, laughing, trying to describe what they were seeing, reacting to things happening overhead in real time.

That sound became part of the eclipse for me.

The collective disbelief somehow made the whole thing bigger.

I’ve now seen people capture this eclipse in countless ways: simple cameras, enormous lenses, wide landscapes, close-ups, film, or no camera whatsoever.

There isn’t a right way.

But if I ever photograph another one, there is one part of my sequence I will absolutely keep:

the part where I do nothing.

After totality, I wasn’t quite finished.

There were calibration frames I still needed for some of the work to come. I photographed some of the night sky as well — the Perseids were happening around the same period, after all — and eventually I had to turn to the files everyone was already waiting for.

I had agreed with Nikon that the first close-up photographs would be available the following morning by 6am, alongside images needed for press.

So I started editing.

That was a very different experience from my normal workflow.

Usually I have the luxury of taking an image home, spending time with it, experimenting, leaving it for a while, coming back and gradually deciding where I want to take it.

Here, I had hours.

In a strange way, it was quite refreshing.

I had to work directly. Make decisions. Finish an image. Deliver it.

The close-ups throughout this newsletter are some of what came out of that night.

There is also a much more complex side to processing eclipse imagery that I haven’t touched on here. I’m currently exploring the possibility of inviting a guest writer for another newsletter specifically about the processing of a more involved eclipse close-up.

If we manage to make that happen, expect considerably more pixel-peeping sometime in September.

There is another image.

The one that started this entire project almost two years ago.

It is considerably wider than anything you’ve seen here, and it approaches the eclipse in a very different way.

That image is almost finished but its reveal will require a little more patience.

Over the past months, Prince Berkoh and I have also been directing and producing a short film around this project. Rather than making a technical film about how to photograph an eclipse, we wanted to explore something much harder to put into words: what it feels like to spend months preparing for an event that lasts only a few minutes — and then finally stand underneath it.

Prince is currently deep into post-production, and I’m incredibly excited about what we’ve made together.

The film and the final artwork will be revealed at the end of September.

There will be much more about both of them soon.

But before moving on to the image I went all the way to Spain to make, I wanted to give these photographs — and the eclipse itself — their own moment.

Because despite everything I learned about photographing totality, the thing I came home remembering most clearly wasn’t a setting, a photograph or even whether a particular bracket worked.

It was looking away from all of it.

And seeing the eclipse with my own eyes.

If you made it to the end, thank you.

More soon. And clear skies.

Angel