Mark C Rupert
2017 Solar Eclipse in Four Parts
On the morning of August 21, 2017, I set up my 8x10 Kodak Master View Camera in the back yard of our home in NE Portland, Oregon, and began calculating the variables necessary to make four individual exposures of different stages of the eclipse on a single sheet of film.
I had looked at some NASA data plots for the timeline and relative position of the eclipse the night before, and felt somewhat confident that I knew where the sun needed to be in the sky overhead in order to spread the four exposures evenly across my composition.
As I removed the lens cap to make the first exposure, I noticed that the birds had changed their pleasant chirping songs to quieter sounds ending with a rising intonation like that of a question being asked.
Mid-way through the event, I was surprised to look down to see hundreds of fluttering natural pinhole images of the "crescent sun" projected onto the ground all around me through the spaces between the leaves of the trees surrounding our yard.
The impact of this simple natural phenomenon stuck with me for days, and remains a potent, visceral memory of that experience in a way that the images from my cameras can never acheive.
