Lazy eclipse photography

Hi,

I've been looking around for software that will take a range of bracketed exposures. So basically all I have to do is point the camera (using 300mm lens on my 350D) at the eclipse during totality and click a mouse botton.

DSLR remote pro www.breezesys.com/DSLRRemotePro/index.htm is the best thing I've found so far. Its $95, but there is a 15 day trial version :-)

This lets you bracket up to 7 shots either side of your chosen shutter speed (or apperture if you prefer). You can also specify how much to step each bracket by. So setting at 1/10's with a bracket of 1 1/3 stops gets you 15 shots in the range of 25s to 1/2500s. The camera was in manual mode for this at 100ISO, f 5.6 , manual focus.

I'l have to go and read up on the best set of exposures to take of totality. Since the Sun is so high, and its my first eclipse [1], I'm not going to bother with landscape shots.


Anyone else seen any alternative software? This seems to do what it claims quite well. The only problem so far was that on one test run (out of 9 so far) the software or camera or both hung and I needed to unplug/replug the USB cable and power cycle the camera. I'm hoping that was a once off...

Cheers,
~Al

[1] ok 2nd technically, but 1st without cloud!

So your bringing your laptop along to the eclipse??
I've already experimented with the canon and the scope its gonna be on, and iso100 and exposures between 200-640 work pretty well, as for totality, I think its gonna take the first 30 seconds of totality to get the exposure right, but I'll be doing a range form 100/sec to 0.5 seconds to get the varing depths of the corona. Im not going to bring a laptop and keep things easy.