Totality!
About twenty minutes to go!
Yesterday was the event of the year, for the east coast and some of the middle parts anyway. A total solar eclipse! I had only ever seen partial eclipses and the last one was when I was a young kid and it was a bit cloudy so all it did was get a bit dark. This time was the real deal. Bluebird skies predicted, the totality in the afternoon, and somewhat close to home. Just a quick jaunt up close to the Canadian border. Easy 2.5 hour drive.
4 am wakeup and on the road by 5 made for light traffic. Newport, VT was the destination, just at the bottom of the large Lake Memphremagog. Got there right at 7:30 as predicted. It was still a bit sleepy in town but that would change quickly. The parking lot that we chose to make our home for the next 10 hours was a local grocery store with ample parking and good views of the sky. It quickly started to fill up. Cars jockeying for position, trying to decide what was the best way to face. Tents and hammock chairs getting erected, a guy selling cans of coke for $2 (I didn't understand the logic of this because we were in a grocery store parking lot, after all) and “eclipse rocks” for a buck, rocks that he tumbled personally “up until the day of the eclipse, and guys in animal suits who drove from Maryland just for this. I think they were Furries…if you don't know, look it up. People with cameras and long lenses setting up hours before the event…needless to say, it was getting wild.
For my wife and me, our setup was simple: old lawn chairs from the 80’s, the ones with the multi-colored weaved webbing (you know the ones), and a cooler with some food and my camp stove to make some coffee for later. Old school stove top percolator. The best.
Workin Hard, Makin Magic
Yup! I bought an eclipse rock!
For camera gear I went a little light. I brought out the stuff I shoot with for commercial work. No analog for this one. Nikon Z7 ii and a 70-200 f/2.8. Longest lens I own. Thanks to my late father who also was also a bit of a photo nut, I had one of those mylar looking filters used to photograph the sun. It worked perfectly. I tethered to my laptop using Capture One software which made on the fly adjustments incredibly easy. And even easier when totality happened. I was able to control the shutter blind by repeatedly hitting Command K. After all, the enjoyment is actually watching the eclipse and not looking at it via a computer screen.
Leaving totality.
It was around 2:30 when the eclipse started, 3:30 totality, and 4:30 finish. It was long lead up to the main event. I made way too many pictures, perhaps out of bored anticipation until we all knew it was getting close by the waning of the light. What was a sunny day turned into a surreal, desaturated twilight. Then just a sliver left, and Boom! It was nighttime in an instant. Except for this now black hole in the sky surrounded by white fire. What we saw was what amounted to the shortest and without a doubt the most intense, beautiful, and unbelievable three minutes of my life. Then just like that, sunshine. It was over. The dark-ish twilight faded back to full sun and except for us and a few other photographers holding out for the full cycle, everybody started packing up to head out. Two hundred thousand people headed off to clog the inadequate Northern Kingdom highway system for the next 8 hours.