Thursday 13 August 2026 – Yesterday saw the most significant solar eclipse visible in the UK since 1999. Between then and now there have been a few partial eclipses, but either the weather has got in the way of being able to see anything or its pith and moment in Surrey was negligible.

1999 was the first time I made any kind of effort to view an eclipse.  I didn’t have a digital camera at that stage, and the film camera I did have wouldn’t have made any sense of what was going on, so we viewed it, along with our neighbours and a glass of something cold, via some kind of pinhole-projection setup.

I can’t remember the exact setup, but this was the sort of image we got.

This gave me something of an incentive to Do Better Next Time, although many years elapsed before I was able to have another go. During that time I made the shift to digital photography (Digital Ixus in 2000) and then to Serious Digital Photography (Nikon D70 in 2005 – I even done a course, innit!) and this passage of the years saw, of course, the first photography rathole that I disappeared down. Many photographers are closely acquainted with GAS – Gear Acquisition Syndrome – and I am of their number. I made my way up the Nikon DSLR ladder, acquiring ever more sophisticated bodies and lenses, with purchases supported somewhat by doing paid photo work. I even bought a specialist eclipse filter, from Thousand Oaks Optical, for a Big Lens I’d decided I needed in order to do another project – wildlife photography. But significant eclipses, UK locations and decent weather stubbornly failed to coincide.

Until last year, actually. March 2025 saw a 40% eclipse in the south of England and the weather was decent. At last! An opportunity!

Annoyingly, the filter I’d bought those years ago was made to fit a Big Lens I no longer had, having moved from DSLR to mirrorless with a concomitant change of lenses. But, as a colleague of mine used to say, nil desperandum: I also had a sheet of Thousand Oaks’s black polymer film, so jerryrigged something or other with a square cut out of the film and pointed my new Big Lens at the sun. This was the result.

It’s satisfactory in its way – correctly exposed and in focus – but, frankly, is creatively a bit lacking. It’s just this photo of a not very interesting eclipse, you know? So when I read that there was to be a significant eclipse in 2026, I sought out an eclipse filter properly sized to fit my current Big Lens (Nikon Z 100-400) so I had it ready for August 12 – a 90% eclipse towards sunset over the south of England, with (hooray!) the prospect of a clear sky.

In the run up to this, I fell down another rathole, which was the result of considering how to make something more of what promised to be a spectacular event. After all, I’d proved that I could get an in-focus photo of the sun, so how could I leaven the experience with a bit of creativity? There were, as far as I could work out, no easily-accessible locations where I could factor the eclipse into a landscape or a cityscape to make it spectacular, like this, for example.

All I have near me is the leafy Surrey countryside, somewhat devoid of points of interest. Since the maximum point of the eclipse was due to be near sunset, I also needed to be on a hill somewhere, and the only one I could think of was Oystershell Hill, on Chobham Common – a short drive and a 10-minute walk away. I’d used it before for a lunar eclipse series so was fairly confident I could get some kind of a result from there. I’d also seen some time-series photos of eclipses and so I thought I’d have a go at one of them, as well as getting a decent photo of the eclipse at its max.

Here, then, was the next rathole – how to achieve the time series? I wondered about using a multiple exposure setup on the Nikon; set it up, point it in the general direction of the sunset and take several exposures into a single image. If I did that, though, I lost my best chance of getting a top quality image of the eclipse at maximum. I have a very good camera in my phone: could I that in some way?  Was it even possible to use it to get  a decent image of the sun without it being over-exposed? Could I use it to do a hyperlapse? The answer in both cases is no; particularly in the second case, I would end up frying the sensor in the phone, which would be stupid.

In the end, I decided that I could probably use my little Sony RX100 vii, but I would need to jerryrig a filter. So I dug out my ThousandOaks film and discovered there the segment I’d cut out as part of the 2005 jerryrig.   I used it to create something I could position over the lens.

To hold it in place, I decided to use a Wimberley Plamp, a photo accessory I’d purchased some years before for….erm, well, I can’t really remember why I bought it, apart from that it looked like it could come in handy. I hoped it would do the job and I’d get to actually use it, rather than have it simply hanging around in my accessory cupboard.

Previous experience, and the several failed experiments that have bedevilled my time as a photographer, told me that I should have a practice, just to make sure that I had the right stuff with me when the time came and hadn’t forgotten anything. So, 24 hours before, I duly drove over to Chobham Common and trudged up to the top of Oystershell Hill, carrying three tripods and a backpack containing two cameras, lenses, filters, water and snacks. I discovered that I’d rather misjudged the terrain.  I remember there being a flat spot at the top of the hill where I envisaged setting up. Trouble was, I found, it wasn’t suitable for a view of the sun, what with trees being in the way and that.  There was a westerly viewpoint, but it was among long grass off to the side of the path – long grass and, it became clear, junior gorse bushes, against which my shorts-and-sandals attire were woefully defenceless.

Cursing rather less than gently, I set up two of my tripods, and put the Sony on one of them behind the filter. And then discovered a plan-reality disconnect.  I had envisaged setting the Sony up to take multiple pictures as the sun crossed its field of view, with the horizon just at the bottom of each frame.  It was actually exceedingly difficult to put this into practice. I had simultaneously to work out an exposure for the sun through the filter, an exposure for the treeline that formed the horizon and the correct focus distance so that both sun and horizon would be sharp. This had to be done without being able to see the screen of the camera, because the image on it wasn’t bright enough and it was reflecting my shirt. Fortunately, the Sony has an electronic viewfinder so all was not entirely lost, but trying to work out whether the sun was actually in the picture at all was the main challenge. My original plan had been to run a practice sequence of photos, but I abandoned this impossibly idealistic goal, realising that luck and guesswork, as well as long trousers and stout shoes, were going to be the order of the morrow. So I didn’t learn much from my practice session, although I did establish that taking photos with the Nikon handheld was over-ambitious. I had expected it to be a rather dull practice session, with not much to do after my original setting up. In reality it was anything but – frustrating, sweaty and ultimately of limited value.

And so Wednesday 12 August dawned and, come 1730, I started the drive to Chobham common. En route, it occurred to me that there might be another suitable location, on Staple Hill, a different part of Chobham Common – but one with a more convenient car park and possibly a more pleasant (i.e. les gorse-ridden) area in which to set up. So I turned off to get there, and entering the car park, saw that lots of other people had had the same idea. The car park was rammed – I got the last space – and people were beginning to park on the road in the area. It was quite the gathering, with many people clearly having prepared quite comprehensively.

There were a few tripods already set up, and some people were clearly taking things even more seriously than I was.

There was a smattering of eclipse specs and cereal-box pinhole cameras to go with the tripods and serious setups – everyone had come prepared in their own way.

I got myself set up as best I could, but it really was difficult to understand what focal length to set the Sony at – if it were short enough to capture the sun as it entered the eclipse, I couldn’t see whether it would appear so tiny that one couldn’t make out the disk of the moon in front of it. Even with half an hour to set up, I was still dithering about this as the disc of the moon made first contact (as shown on this Nikon image)

so I did some final guesswork for focal length, direction, focus distance and exposure, prayed, and set the Sony going, taking a photo every minute.

The next couple of hours unfolded gently, from 1820 to 2010, with the Sony taking photos automatically, and me taking occasional photos manually with the Nikon. Maximum eclipse was at 1913

but it hadn’t gone very dark;

we couldn’t tell whether the birds had fallen quiet, as we were just by the M3 and traffic was speeding by in complete ignorance of the unfolding spectacle. A contact posted on Instagram that the parrots in the park he was visiting went quiet, but soon started up again as the moon cleared the sun.

People started drifting away soon after the maximum had been reached, but I stayed on for another hour. I was among the last to leave, having recorded photos of the sun as it headed towards the horizon. Eventually I packed up and headed home.

That was when the hard work started, really, because I arrived home with 160 photos and only the vaguest idea of (a) whether they were any good and (b) what to do with them. Completing the processing of them and transforming them into what the Instagram Generation would call “content” took the next 24 hours.

Because the Nikon picture of the eclipse at maximum was, well, not boring, exactly, but certainly had nothing remarkable about it that thousands of others hadn’t already captured, I decided the first thing was to get a time series sorted out. My first target being social media, I needed to do it quickly, so I took a quick look at my available content from the Sony.

I had taken photos every minute, and I elected to check out very fourth photo to see how the sun had moved. The first two pictures I had through the filter with the sun in it were these.

which show the movement, but of course the strength of the filter means that everything else in the scene is blacked out. For a backdrop, I’d taken a photo of the general scene without the filter.

The scenery is too dark and the sky too bright, but this is the sort of thing that can relatively easily be fixed, using my favourite RAW editor, DxO Photolab.

 

So: I had 20 images of the sun on a black background and a general scene to place them in.  For this, I had to use a different editor; my general image editor of choice, for historical reasons, going back decades, is Corel Paintshop Pro.  To create an image I “simply” had to load the backdrop image and the 20 sun images and then layer the suns over the backdrop – another rathole to spend some time in. So I ground my way through a repetitive process of adding image layers, and this was the final result – cropped in a bit to avoid a couple of defects in the backdrop.

Despite its defects, I have to say I was pretty pleased with it, bearing in mind the amount of guesswork that went into it. For social media purposes, I thought it should make pretty much the impact I was after, so I posted it, and it seemed to get a pretty good response from those that its algorithms bothered to showed it to.

The Nikon photos were all lovely and sharp, but individually didn’t tell much of a story. I wondered whether it might be possible to make a video from them, simply centring each frame on the sun and fading between them.

It’s one way of looking at it, I guess, but not all that inspiring. I wondered if I could animate the time series somehow, which led me to revisit a previous rathole. Looking at the individual Sony images revealed some red fringes around each of the suns. So I had to re-edit all the pictures to remove those, and also spent quite a lot of time trying to to improve the backdrop by making the top a little darker.  But I emerged from the rathole with this.

There are notable defects in al of this content, but all in all I’m not dissatisfied with it as a day’s work.  It’ll certainly stand me in good stead for the next one in the UK, which is in….oh, wait….2090.

Bugger.

Never mind. Maybe I can find another eclipse somewhere else. Watch this space.