I live in Eugene Oregon which is in the annularity path of next month's solar eclipse, so if the weather gods are kind I'll be able to witness -- and photograph -- my first annular eclipse. Actually, it's my first solar eclipse of any kind, other than partial eclipses. Obviously, I don't want to wait until the day of the eclipse to figure out what settings and lenses I need to use. Therefore, I've gotten out my polarizing filter and have been practicing photographing the sun, both in single shots and series of shots using the interval timer. My idea regarding the latter was that I would load the interval shots into a single Photoshop workspace, as a stack of layers, and then make the background of all layers except one transparent, to create an eclipse sequence.
My first question is: Does the above procedure seem like a good way to go about it, or Is there a better way I haven't thought of? For instance, what about taking a series of videos, and using the frames as still images? I understand that video frames aren't usually as good as still images, but in this case we're talking about the moon very slowly moving in front of the sun.
My second question: I'm getting good images of the sun, except for the fact that it appears pale blue white. Naturally, I wasn't expecting that it would be the color of an egg yolk, like a child's painting, but I didn't think it would be blue either. Does the blue tint come from the polarizing filter, or is it due to some setting that I need to change? I've been using both an 85-300mm kit lens and a 50mm normal lens; for both lenses, ISO between 200 and 500, exposure around 1/500"; and aperture f/22. I know I can fix the color in post, but I'm curious about why the blue tint is happening.
My third question: ****! I know I had another question I was going to ask, but I can't think of it now. I'll have to add it in the comments later.
(Fun fact: Although the 2017 eclipse was only partial here, Eugene was just outside the totality path and the magnitude of the eclipse was much greater at .99. This year's eclipse will be magnitude .95 here, meaning that the "ring of fire" will be about 10 percent of the sun's apparent surface area.)
