Solar Eclipse and Listener Questions

Jim talks with Jeff and Brent about shooting the solar eclipse and listener questions about sharpening, keeping TIF files, getting past being a beginning photographer, and balancing time as a hobbyist photographerShooting the Eclipse

* Unless you have been hiding under a rock you must know that a rare event is coming up on 8/21 where a full solar eclipse is going to sweep across America like the sash on a beauty pageant contestant.  Starting in the upper north west in Oregon and ends in the south east in South Carolina.
* Brent and I did an entire Photo Taco episode about photographing the eclipse and we’ll make sure to put a link to that in the show notes.  But a few more resources have come up since then so we wanted to briefly cover those in this IP episode.
* First Brent, give like the 2-minute recap about what you need and how to shoot the eclipse.
* I don’t know why I didn’t think it would be a craze to see the eclipse, but I got serious about trying to get somewhere to shoot it waaaay too late 🙂  The wife and I were going to drive north 3.5 hours to Idaho Falls, find a little spot to shoot in, spend the night in a hotel, and then mosey on over to the spot for the eclipse.  Turns out there are no hotels available and half of the US seems to have plans to migrate toward the spots where the eclipse will go through so now we are going to stick at home.  Which means I needed to figure out where I should go to have a chance at making the most of what I will see and I am using the Photo Pills app to do that.

* For those that may not have heard the Photo Taco episode covering the seriously good Photo Pills application that is indispensable for planning your outdoor photography shoot, check that one out to by searching “photo taco photopills.”  Since doing that episode the Photo Pills guys have added some specific functionality to the app to help you plan your eclipse shot.
* They have a really good guide online on how to use the app to do that which will be linked to in the show notes (http://www.photopills.com/articles/solar-eclipse#step1) but briefly what you do is going into the Planner pill and you swipe from right to left on the very top part of the planner until you see something that says “No eclipse is loaded”.  You tap the button to the left of that wording and it will change to say “Total Solar Eclipse – August 21, 2017”
* For me here in Herriman, Utah it says I will still have a Magnitude 0.916 eclipse!  So I will actually see it where there is only a small sliver of sun showing that doesn’t get covered by the moon.  I won’t have that hole dark shadow experience where it looks like night time outside, but it will still be kind of exciting to see.
* If you swipe from right to left one more time at the top of the Planner pill you will see something that shows the different phases of the eclipse and the times they will happen in your area.  For me in Herriman it will start at 10:14am where the moon will just start to block the sun, it will progress to having the moon most cover the sun at 11:34am and then be almost completely uncovered again by 12:59pm.
* If you click on the icon to the left of that information then the time in the planner will change to those times of those phases.  First click the planner time will change to 10:14am for me and show me where the sun will be at that point.
* In fact, now that the time is moved to 8/21 at 10:14am I can swipe from left to right on the top of the Planner pill until I get to the Sun and Moon information and can see that the sun will be at 38.28 degrees of elevation at that time.  At 11:34am when it is as covered as it will get for me the sun will be all the way up to 51.53 degrees and when the eclipse is over it will be at 60.52 degrees.
* I can use this information, along with the Augmented Reality features of P...