The 2024 total solar eclipse is coming to Dallas on April 8 and the event has already gained global traction. People from all over the world are traveling to Texas, as cities like Dallas and Austin are in its path of totality.

With the eclipse gaining so much attention, the question everyone is asking is, “How do I take a photograph of the eclipse?”

SMU Film and Media Arts professor Rebecca Flores has the answer.

“Whether it’s your phone or another camera, any camera is going to work as long as you shoot with a solar filter,” Flores said.

Regardless of the type of camera you have, there are some tricks people should know before taking pictures of the eclipse. Not everyone has a professional camera, so this camera guide is centered around the use of smartphone cameras.

Here’s a guide on how to take a picture of the eclipse with a smartphone:

1. Before the Eclipse

Filters! Filters! Filters!

Protecting your eyes during the eclipse is crucial and the same goes for protecting your camera lens. Without a solar filter, you risk damaging your camera lens. SMU physics professor, Joel Meyers, explained how the eclipse can damage a camera lens if not protected properly.

“Like our eyes, the sensor in a camera tends to be very sensitive to intense radiation,” Meyers said. “If we look right up at the sun, we can go partially blind and can damage our retinas. With a camera, it’s the same thing.”

Professor Flores further explains how the sun can burn your camera sensors without the use of a solar filter.

“The inside of your camera has a sensor that collects light to create an image,” Flores said. “If you shoot directly at the sun and let too much light hit that sensor, it’s going to burn a circle into your sensor and completely damage the camera. You would either have to replace the sensor or replace the whole camera.”

The American Astronomical Society also strongly advises the use of a solar filter, “at any time other than during totality.” There are several solar eclipse smartphone filters available on Amazon and at local camera stores.

What if you don’t want to buy a solar filter for your phone?

“If you don’t have custom solar filters for your phone camera, you can use eclipse glasses,” Meyers said.

Use a tripod

The best way to take photos of the eclipse is to keep your camera as steady as possible. To achieve a steady camera frame, use a tripod. When people film with their hands, the video often comes out shaky. A tripod will help keep your smartphone stable during the eclipse. It also allows you to be hands-free so you can be in your eclipse video with friends, capturing the silhouettes of everyone enjoying totality.

Position the tripod so that it faces the direction of the eclipse, set up your phone, and start filming. Solar eclipse photographer and author of How to Photograph the Solar Eclipse, Alan Dyer, in an interview with Space.com explains the tripod use best.

“Put it in wide-angle mode, start the movie going a couple of minutes before totality, and just let it run,” Dyer said.

Practice on the moon before the eclipse hits

Practice makes perfect. To get the perfect picture of the eclipse, NASA suggests practicing on “the full moon to get an idea of how large the sun-in-eclipse will appear with your smartphone lens.”

Taking pictures of the moon on a smartphone is tricky because the phone camera automatically adjusts the exposure, making the moon overexposed with no details in the dark. To avoid this, manually adjust the exposure with your finger on the camera app. This is challenging, hence why NASA suggests practicing a few days before.

2. Phone Settings for Eclipse

Turn off the flash before totality hits!

“Turn off the flash, you don’t need it,” said Robert Hart, SMU photojournalism professor.

When the eclipse hits totality, the sky will turn pitch-black and resemble nighttime. One might think flash will be useful in the dark, but using flash is the wrong way to go.

During totality, if you’re going to have something in the foreground, like Dallas Hall, you don’t want it to get blasted by flash. Shooting with flash during totality will produce photos with white light. It makes the photo look unnatural and grainy.

Not only does flash make your photography worse but “it will detract from the experience of totality for everyone around you,” Jamie Carter, a science and technology contributor for Space.com said.

Do not zoom in

For the eclipse, do not zoom in. According to Carter, “pinching the screen to zoom in on the solar eclipse will lower image resolution.” When you zoom in, you lose resolution and it reduces the quality of the image, resulting in a grainy photo.

Brightness

Flores mentioned the one thing to pay attention to is the brightness of photos. For iPhone users, when you open the camera app, there is an option to manually brighten or darken a photo – this is called exposure. By manually adjusting the brightness, you can set the exposure while shooting the eclipse.

Flores suggests using a lower exposure for the eclipse. When you use low exposure, it makes specific details more defined that you wouldn’t be able to see with a high exposure.

“You’re going to have to lower the exposure to see more detailing in the sun,” Flores said.

Don’t count on auto-focus

During the eclipse, if you let your phone camera use auto-focus, this makes the camera focus on anything and everything other than the eclipse. To keep the camera focused on the eclipse, use manual focus or “focus lock” to keep the camera focused on the eclipse. When the focus lock appears, set the focus to infinity.

Most phones have this option. For iPhones, hold down on your subject until the “AE/AF” indicator shows up. Depending on the type of iPhone you have, there are iPhone camera apps that can help set camera focus to infinity if it’s not an option in the camera app. Android cameras have the focus set to infinity built in and don’t need an additional app.

Use Burst Mode

Burst mode allows you to take multiple pictures at once. One moment during the eclipse you’ll want to capture is the “diamond ring”. This is the last bit of sunlight before totality hits, making everything completely dark. Be sure to act fast, as the diamond ring happens in seconds and can be missed if people aren’t paying attention.

By using burst mode, you can watch the diamond ring happen in real-time and not have to worry about taking a picture.

3. During the Eclipse

What to do During Totality

Once it hits totality, take off the solar filters! Totality happens when the moon completely covers the sun, turning everything into darkness. At this point, camera filters can be removed and pictures can be taken of the eclipse safely. You can keep filters on during totality, but solar filters will make the coloring of the sun look different.

“We’re used to seeing the sun being orange,” Flores said. “A lot of solar filters make the Sun look a different color. It might look blue or even purple.”

Once totality is over, put solar filters back on your cameras otherwise you risk damaging them.

Take a second to watch the eclipse

Remember to take the time and watch the eclipse with your own eyes. Getting the opportunity to watch the total solar eclipse’s path of totality in front of your eyes is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Don’t get caught up in trying to take the “perfect” picture.

If you are going to focus on getting the “perfect picture,” focus on what’s happening around you.

“The most important thing is to focus on the people and what’s going on around you,” Hart said. “Photograph the people and have the eclipse in the background.”

World Press Photo has announced its regional winners for 2024, in the annual competition that celebrates the world’s best photojournalism. 

Two Australian photographers were recognised: in the Singles category, Eddie Jim (The Age/Sydney Morning Herald) has won for his image Fighting, Not Sinking. In the image, Lotomau Fiafia, a community elder, stands with his grandson John at the point where he remembers the shoreline used to be when he was a boy. Salia Bay, Kioa Island, Fiji, 8 August 2023. 

In the Open Format category, Aletheia Casey has won for A Lost Place, described as a striking meditation connecting Australia’s colonial past with its precarious climate future.

The project presents a series of manipulated and recontextualized images, conveying the artist’s personal feelings of frustration and horror in response to the devastating 2019-2020 wildfires in New South Wales.

From here, On 18 April, the four global winners, selected from more than 100 regional winners, will be announced in Amsterdam.

The awarded photographs, a small selection of which you can see below, were selected from 61,062 entries by 3,851 photographers from 130 countries.

They were judged first by six regional juries, and the winners were then chosen by a global jury consisting of the regional jury chairs plus the global jury chair – Fiona Shields, Head of Photography at The Guardian. 

After the winner’s announcement, the exhibition will travel worldwide, including to Sydney, later this year.

His own sign language of sweeping, dramatised gestures is rarely fully understood by those outside Asom Khan’s closest friends and family but the 15-year-old is able to speak through his art and photography.

From his shelter in the Rohingya refugee camps of south-east Bangladesh, Khan takes photos to share the stories of his community – of his elderly neighbours, disabled people, and of women at work and in times of crisis.

It was a journey that started with a photograph of him in 2017 – tears running down his face as he hung on to the side of an aid truck – that won awards for a Canadian press photographer, Kevin Frayer, as 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh from massacres in what the UN described as ethnic cleansing by the Myanmar military.

View image in fullscreen

That photo has stuck with Khan, who is deaf and mute, and when he saw other Rohingya becoming photographers, using budget smartphones to document daily life, he fully understood the power of an image.

“I was inspired by other Rohingya photographers. When there were floods or fires or other issues, they would come and take pictures. I saw that there was some power in it,” says Khan, whose friend interprets for him.

Since arriving in Bangladesh, he has also been producing vivid paintings, sometimes of idyllic Myanmar villages scenes, others of those villages under attack and the chaos he witnessed.

Raised by his aunt and uncle after his mother died in childbirth, Khan had no opportunity to learn formal sign language so he improvised, teaching his own version to those around him. But art and photography has given him a freedom to communicate without an interpreter.

“I can’t speak but my photos do. I take pictures of the elderly – how they spend their days – and of how we suffer in our daily lives here,” says Khan.

View image in fullscreen

The camps Khan arrived at six years ago quickly became the world’s largest, with almost 1 million Rohingya crammed into bamboo and plastic shelters.

As conditions have worsened, with education, work and movement limited, international attention has died down, leaving the refugees to deal with their own problems. As long as he is unable to return to Myanmar – and with violence continuing, this is unlikely to happen soon – Khan feels a responsibility to capture their experiences.

“I feel like when I show pictures of the Rohingya situation to the world, they understand a bit more what we face.”

View image in fullscreen

Frayer, the photographer now with Getty Images who took Khan’s photo in 2017, says he clearly remembers the moment when he saw the boy clinging to a truck amid a chaotic crowd waiting for rations.

“Even thinking of it now, I can see it almost in slow motion. I remember taking a few frames and then he disappeared into the crowd below.

“I remember feeling quite moved by how much courage this young boy showed,” says Frayer.

He found Khan again in 2018 and spent time with him, finally learning more of his story as they communicated through his sign language and his drawings.

“I was so moved and astounded to learn that he had taken an interest in photography. I saw in his artwork that he was incredibly talented at telling his story through his art, and that photography would indeed be a very strong tool for him,” says Frayer.

“I am not sure if my picture had anything to do with this passion he has for photography now, but I am very glad to know that he sees the power it can have.

“He told me in a message once that he loves it because it shows the world the culture of his community. What a nice thought.”

After New York New York, Dutch-Argentinian photographer Richard Koek announces the release of his photography book Tokyo Tokyo, available April 30. In the title, the repetition of the city’s name is already meant to be a first clue to what his shots will reveal. Koek looks for the dualism that every city holds in its essence. In the case of Tokyo, tradition on the one hand and extreme contemporaneity on the other. Clichés collapse and make way for the real daily life of the inhabitants of the Japanese capital, but capturing it was not easy.

«I did not realise it was quite an impossible task to fulfil,» Koek explains in an interview with Creative Boom. «Tokyo cannot be captured in one book, it has 40,000,000 citizens and is way more spread out than New York City. I did find a way that somehow made sense for a book, and I hope I succeeded in capturing it». Without a doubt, Koek reveals a curious side of the city, highlighting the stark contrast that characterizes the Edochian universe. Let’s find out through some of the shots shown in the preview.

What Richard Koek points out is that Tokyo Tokyo is everything you do not expect from this city. As a tourist, as an outsider, when you leave for Tokyo you have a very clear idea of what to expect, provided mainly by the images propagated by the media, but when you come back this idea is overturned. «My book will show two sides of the city; the beauty in centuries-old traditions, as well as the beauty in daily life of the moment that we all live,» Koek explains again to Creative Boom. Indeed, another aspect that emerges is the rapid evolution of the city, which, while jealously preserving traditions, is also constantly changing, both from an architectural point of view – new buildings are constantly springing up – and from a socio-cultural point of view.

Courtesy Richard Koek

Mario Tarantino describes himself as a ‘monochromantic’ but it was the photographic potential of brutalist architecture that led him to capture the image that won an award. “I submitted the photo because I felt the narrative I wished to convey when looking at it,” says Mario. He already had a creative direction in mind before being on location.

“I wanted to create an outer-worldly narrative, a meeting place or place of worship on another planet. Once on location, the sheer scale of the monument was impressive. To convey that immenseness, I put a silhouette of my father in the frame.”

Brutalist architecture is built with rough concrete, making for a heavily textured surface. “Getting the right angle, aperture and exposure was crucial in keeping the balance between enough and too much detail,” he says. 

Another challenge was the strong light, therefore Mario used an ND filter which let him control the light further. With a minimalistic environment and subject, the composition is crucial. “The composition is minimalist – the monument with its clean lines is placed on the third with the sky creating lots of negative space. The scale is demonstrated by the silhouette on the opposite third, which creates a balance between the subjects,” says Mario. 

Using traditional composition rules such as the rule of thirds is a tried and tested method, but it’s important to experiment as every subject requires different strategies. “Try experimenting with both portrait and landscape orientations when photographing your subject. Sometimes a tighter frame is better to guide the viewer’s eye into the frame making it more engaging,” says Mario. “Try and take the time to visit a location before going to photograph it. That way, you are familiar with the surroundings resulting in better composition as well as knowing what time of the day is best to do the shoot”. 

When it comes to light, he prefers to shoot in the early morning or late afternoon when the light is softer. “I prefer shooting in low light conditions. However, I have taken great photos during strongly lit daytime as well. The midday and early afternoon sun can also enrich B&W photography, especially if you want to create high-contrast imagery,” he adds. 

Mario follows a minimalistic philosophy of ‘less is more’. This is not just visible in his photographic work but also his technical approach. One of his most important accessories is a tripod for long-exposure shots. “When it comes to lenses, try and keep it simple,” he says. “A 24-70mm is a great all-rounder and should be part of everyone’s kitbag. I usually carry this optic and a 16-35mm flat wide, so I’m not overcomplicating things on location.”

Mario Tarantino

Mario Tarantino’s photographic style includes architecture, street and landscapes. He adheres to a ‘less is more’ philosophy as shown in his minimalist photo compositions. The simplicity of deep blacks coupled with crisp whites and the tones in between, makes the mundane look marvellous. Mario often uses long exposures, creating low-key tones for more emotive shots.

Lens choice

Expand the view by working with short focal lengths

“I enjoy working with wide-angle lenses and with practice, have got to know their pros and cons. What I love about this optic is the spectrum of genres they cover, from architecture, landscapes and even street. 

A wide-angle lens draws the eye into the scene, creating a strong feeling of perspective as well as a greater field of view in either landscape or portrait format. I also find the depth of field on wide-angle lenses superior to telephoto in that images are usually sharp throughout, with the exception of the corners. I work with a Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L.

When shooting with a wide-angle lens, fill the frame to avoid empty spaces where the eyes exit the image. Try to shoot at low angles, making use of leading lines to take the viewer through the image to the background.”

Three photographic techniques

1. Exposure bracketing 

“This is one way of creating well-lit and detailed photographs. Expose for the blacks, shadows, mids, lights and highlights. Each of these exposures can then be blended together, creating a wonderfully detailed and lit image. Having these exposures also allows for greater artistic expression in the way the image is lit and guides the viewer’s eye through the photo.”

2. Focus stacking

“Sharpness and detail are important so focus stacking is especially effective when working with wide-angle lenses. This technique helps to ensure a sharp image from front to back. To do so, multiple images with different focus points need to be created. Start by focusing on the foreground and then move it through the image. The images can be blended in post-production.”

3. Get support

“Always bring your tripod with you, especially if you are going to shoot in low light conditions. It is vital for exposure bracketing, focus stacking and long exposures as well as providing a steady base for sharp images. A tripod also helps with your photo composition, as it forces you to slow down and take in your surroundings as you set it up, usually resulting in a better composition.”

Taipei, April 3 (CNA) Photographer Chang Chao-tang (張照堂), one of the first Taiwanese to explore experimental photography and filmmaking, has died at the age of 81.

Chang passed away at 11 p.m. Tuesday night in Taipei, according to photography magazine “Voices of Photography” (VOP), which announced the news on behalf of Chang’s family on Facebook on Wednesday.

Born in New Taipei in 1943, Chang was introduced to photography in junior high school when he borrowed a camera from his brother.

He was further inspired to pursue the art in high school after attending a photography club led by Cheng Shang-hsi (鄭桑溪), one of the first documentary photography artists in Taiwan.

Chang developed a passion for literature and art while a student at National Taiwan University, where he learned about surrealism, existentialism, and modernism. These influences led to his experimental creations in later years, the VOP said.

In 1965, Chang and Cheng held a modern photography exhibition featuring their works, which caught the public’s eye due to their departure from mainstream conventions.

Chang began working as a photojournalist at China Television Company in 1968 and participated in the production of many TV documentaries on special topics.

His works earned him Golden Horse awards for best documentary and best cinematography for documentary and Golden Bell Awards for best cinematography and editing.

The shooting of “China Behind” (再見中國) in 1973 marked Chang’s successful venture into film production. His other works include “Woman of Wrath” (殺夫), “Tang Dynasty Beautiful Male” (唐朝綺麗男) and “Last Train to Tan Shui”(淡水最後列車), all shot in 1984, the VOP said.

Chang was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Horse Film Festival in 2022, which described Chang as more than a photography master who “has brought a profound, diverse and comprehensive influence on Taiwan arts.”

The way he shot films inspired succeeding directors such as Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏), Huang Hsin-yao (黃信堯), and Yang Li-chou (楊力州).

Additionally, Chang is the only photographer to have won the National Award for Arts and the National Cultural Award, in 1999 and 2011, respectively.

The Taiwan International Documentary Festival announced on Jan. 31 that Chang won its outstanding contribution award.