Photographing the Solar Eclipse in Berlin

Photographing the solar eclipse in Berlin was a very spontaneous thing for me. I was just sitting at home after doing a long corporate photoshoot in the evening, relaxing, when someone called me and told me there was going to be a solar eclipse in about an hour.

I never felt super excited about these events before. Partially because there are different types of cosmic events, like the red moon, which is a bit more common, and I had heard about eclipses before. I always thought, okay, this happens every five or ten years or something like that, and didn’t pay much attention.

Only after this one did I actually read a bit more about it and realise how unusual this particular eclipse was.

Going to Tempelhofer Feld with my camera

Crowd of people silhouetted against a bright orange sunset at Tempelhof Field in Berlin, captured by Fedor Vasilev.

I was invited to go to Tempelhof to see the eclipse, so I decided to grab my camera. Actually, one of the main reasons was that I didn’t have the glasses to properly look at the Sun myself.

And yeah, I successfully forgot my filters, as always. I didn’t take an ND filter or a CPL filter, which probably would have given me a few more options for how to photograph it.

At the same time, I think I still got quite some epic shots.

I was photographing with my Sony A7 IV, which is currently my main camera and has better dynamic range than my second camera. For the lens, I used the Samyang 135mm f/1.8.

Obviously, I wasn’t using the open aperture. I closed it almost fully, sometimes actually going to f/22 and sometimes keeping it somewhere around f/18 or f/16, depending on the frame I wanted to shoot.

At Tempelhofer Feld it is a big open area and seems like it was a prime location to watch eclipse, so half a city went there to see it. Well rather just something like 15-30K not actually half a city but it still felt like a lot.

Just photographing the Sun was a little boring

Solar eclipse partially obscuring the sun behind wispy clouds above a dark tree silhouette, captured by Fedor Vasilev.

Almost immediately I realised that frames with just the Sun were slightly boring.

To expose the Sun properly, everything around it basically goes black. I still included a couple of photographs with just the Sun in the frame for variety, and because I could pull up the shadows a bit afterwards and get a nice halo around it and some light in the clouds.

My favourite pictures, though, were the ones where I successfully captured both the Sun and the crowd looking at it.

I kind of focused on both, as I normally do, because I like to capture the environment and the whole atmosphere around something. Photographing just the people without the Sun didn’t feel suitable for this type of event either, because I still wanted the eclipse itself to be part of the picture.

So for me, photographing the solar eclipse in Berlin became much more about the people looking at it than just getting a technically perfect photograph of the Sun.

Trying HDR, and messing it up slightly

Crowd gathered on a grassy field watches a partial solar eclipse against a warm, hazy golden sunset.

I was mostly shooting HDR brackets so I could naturally bring up the shadows a little and keep the crowd at least visible in the frame.

In the end, though, I messed up the settings slightly, and a few of the HDR images actually turned out worse than the normal photographs after editing.

In my continuous bracketing, for example, one of the frames was sometimes shot at around 1/100th of a second. On a 135mm lens I slightly blurred that frame, so when I merged the exposures I ended up with patches of slightly blurred and completely sharp images combined into one.

Not exactly ideal.

But I think I still got at least one shot that was really epic.

Interestingly, by the time it got closer to sunset, photographing everything actually became much easier. The main phase of the eclipse happened while the Sun was still quite high, but closer to the horizon it became a bit dimmer and I could start photographing the actual rays of light coming from it and falling directly onto the people who were standing there looking at the Sun.

That was probably my favourite part visually.

Smoke, crowds and losing everyone at Tempelhof

Silhouettes of people watching a partial solar eclipse in the
sky captured by Berlin-based photographer Fedor Vasilev

Another thing I especially liked was that directly in front of me there was the grill area on Tempelhofer Feld.

So in some of the photographs I could use the smoke coming from the grills together with the light. It gave me something more to work with in the foreground instead of simply having an empty field underneath the eclipse.

And yeah, I also ended up being alone throughout basically the whole evening.

Because there were thousands of people on Tempelhofer Feld, the internet connection stopped working almost completely. I was supposed to find my friends somewhere in the crowd. We sort of knew the approximate place where we should meet, but once the connection disappeared we couldn’t reach each other anymore.

So it was just me walking around and taking pictures, while occasionally replying to questions from people passing by who were curious about me photographing the Sun.

I had to focus manually as well, so I even put the lens hood on. I normally almost never use it, but in this case it made working with the lens and focus ring a bit easier.

With the 135mm and the hood attached, though, the camera looked absolutely huge. I think that was also why quite a few people passing by became curious and stopped to ask me about photographing the Sun.