Photographing the eclipse in Ceuta: gear, settings and what not to do | Ceuta Eclipse

If this is your first total eclipse, do not photograph it

This is the unanimous advice of people who have seen several. You have 4 min 48 s and they vanish while you fight with the camera. Set a phone recording on wide angle, forget about it, and watch.

Partial phase: filter mandatory#

Throughout the partial phase you need a solar filter in front of the lens, not behind it. Without one you will burn the sensor and, with an optical viewfinder, your eye. With a filter, a reasonable starting point is ISO 100, f/8, adjusting shutter speed until the disc is well exposed; every filter differs, so test on the ordinary Sun days beforehand.

Totality: filter off#

Remove the filter the moment the last sliver of Sun disappears, and replace it before it returns.
The corona has an enormous dynamic range: bracket widely, from 1/1000 s to 1 s at f/8 and ISO 400, and blend afterwards.
Focus at infinity manually and tape it down. Autofocus fails against a dark sky.
Tripod and remote release or timer. At long focal lengths any vibration shows.
Turn off image review on screen: it steals seconds and wrecks your dark adaptation.

With a phone#

Modern phones give respectable results during totality if you steady them. Digital zoom at the Sun does not work. What does work, and almost nobody does, is the opposite: a wide angle capturing the landscape of Ceuta under the light of totality, with the horizon glowing in 360° and people looking up. That is a photograph you can take and no stock library has.

What is genuinely worth preparing#

A time-lapse of the landscape as the light collapses.
Recording the sound: the birds falling silent and the crowd shouting as totality begins.
The shadows on the ground during the partial phase: hundreds of crescent Suns under the trees.
Rehearsing the whole sequence on an ordinary afternoon with the real Sun. There is no second take on the day.