The closest to a total eclipse I’d seen was in 1993, when I saw an annular eclipse in northwest Ohio (90% covered because the moon was further from Earth). Shooting on film, with no idea what I was doing, the photos were terrible, but it was still a neat experience.
In 2017, I arrived at the Greenwood Mall in Bowling Green, Kentucky, not long after it opened for the day and spent several hours reading a book in a comfy chair inside the nicely air-conditioned atrium. Then a little after 2 p.m., I walked out to my car and grabbed my equipment — solar glasses, two cameras, a few lenses, and a blanket. I put the blanket in a grassy area just outside the mall’s parking lot, not far from one of the city’s larger water towers.
The sky was blue and mostly clear. There was a troubling patch of high clouds to the west that were moving my way, but they drifted south of the sun before long.
I put a solar filter on the 70-400mm telephoto zoom lens I brought. The filter material was a polymer sheet I bought on Amazon that I cut to fit over a generic screw-on lens hood. It allowed me to shoot directly at the sun without damaging the camera sensor (or my eye). I took a few photos as the moon slid across the sun.