Photographing the total solar eclipse

How Miami's Jay Murdock captured the 2017 eclipse

By Miami University

March 19^th, 2024

My goal: Get to the path of totality

Murdock is marketing coordinator for University Communications and Marketing focusing on the Farmer School of Business. He is also known for his weather photography. View more of his images in the Miami News story "Never the same photo twice: Former photojournalist Jay Murdock captures weather and sky images."

By Jay Murdock

You may have heard that there’s a total solar eclipse coming to Oxford (and a sizable chunk of the United States) on April 8. Shortly after 3:08 p.m., the sun will disappear behind the moon for just short of three minutes in the Oxford area, an event known as “totality.” The eclipse process will start about an hour before totality, and then continue for another hour or so after.

Back on August 21, 2017, I got up at 2 a.m. to hit the road driving south. My goal: Get into the path of totality somewhere where the skies were most likely to be clear. As that eclipse was going from northwest to southeast, every destination I considered was at least a four-hour drive from Oxford.

My chosen target was Bowling Green, Kentucky, just inside the totality zone and right next to Interstate 65. I left way too early because I had no idea what traffic might be like that day.

This wasn’t my first eclipse, but it was my first total eclipse. I’ve photographed a few partial eclipses over the years, such as this one on a fairly cloudy day in October 2014.

Didn't need a solar filter for this because the clouds provided enough protection, yet still let the eclipse show.

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.

The combined cost to make this was about $25 from Amazon

I took a deep breath and started shooting

As totality approached, I took the filter off the lens, laid back on the blanket, took a deep breath, and as darkness fell, started shooting. Bowling Green was located just inside the totality zone, so I had 76 seconds to work with.

The camera’s automatic settings wanted to make the photo too bright, so I dialed in some underexposure using the exposure compensation dial so the photos looked more like what I could see with my eyes.

This is just after totality began. Note the little solar flare to the lower right

I let the shutter stay open longer to get some of the light flare around the edges of the moon.

80 photos in the first 45 seconds of totality

Near me, one of the mall workers who came out to watch mentioned that his phone photos weren’t doing the scene justice. Still shooting, I mentioned that his phone camera probably has a way to manually control exposure, such as “pro” or “manual” mode, and he was delighted to find that it did.

Looking back now, I see that I shot about 80 photos in the first 45 seconds of totality, mostly using the telephoto lens to get the eclipse as large as possible in the frame. I also changed cameras once to take some wide angle shots. This is where I discovered that perhaps choosing a more interesting foreground is a good idea.

The water tower needed painting, and the powerlines weren't very attractive. But I did like the wide angle look at the eclipse.

Crickets started chirping in the dark

Then, I stopped. For 15 seconds, I just looked around at the horizon at the twilight glow, similar to that you see just before sunrise or after sunset – except it was everywhere, not just in the east or west. I listened as the birds stopped singing and a few crickets added their chirps into the dark air. I picked up the camera and took a few more photos.

And then suddenly, it was bright again. Even though the sun was still 98 percent eclipsed, the brightness was startling after the darkness.

I transmitted one of the eclipse photos to my phone and sent it to my wife, a Miami Physics department professor, who received it just in time to use it in her presentation she was giving in Ireland that day. Then I packed up and started the four-hour drive home, forever changed at least a little bit by the experience.