Can you take pictures of the sun?

[snapsnap1973]

I read that you should not look at the sun through your viewfinder, but then why do you sometimes see photos with the sun in them?

Is it ok to film a landscape shot with the sun in it? What protocol do you use, etc?

 

[beachrat]

Hell yeah.

 

[480sparky41 40]

Yep.

 

[pgriz]

You mean like this?

1/4000sec, f/8, ISO 200

 

[limr31]

Or this?

Day 34 - Bird and sun by limrodrigues, on Flickr

If you're shooting with a film rangefinder with fabric shutter curtains, then pointing the camera at the sun could result in your camera catching fire as the lens concentrates the sun on the flammable fabric. SLRs protect those curtains when the mirror is down in the resting position. As for non-SLR digital cameras? I have no idea. I took the above with a digital point and shoot and I can assure you that the camera did not break or burst into flames.

 

[480sparky41 40]

Or this?

Yes.... 300mm directly at sun. With 10x ND and VND.

 

[wfooshee]

I've had the sun accidently come into view while following a bird in flight at 300mm. Not pleasant.

OTOH, I shot the recent partial eclipse at sunset, but did not have my eye at the viewfinder. I kinda peeked at the viewfinder from well back, just to make sure it was in the frame, then shot. No ND filter, absolute minimum exposure I could get: 1/8000 at f:40 and ISO 100, 70-300 at 300mm. I even got sunspots!!!! (Confirmed by comparing to a friend's image shot through a telescope with solar filters, which I told her was cheating.)

You can look through the viewfinder without looking AT the sun, just like actually looking at a sunset.

 

[jake337]

I can recall an old thread which had a macro of the sun.

 

[TCampbell]

You should not stare at the sun yourself. As an astronomer who does a lot of solar outreach, I have to give the safety lecture every time I bring students to the telescope because even though I'm about to let them look the sun using instruments specifically designed to be safe for the purpose... I don't want them getting the idea that it's ok to stare at the sun without the benefit of the equipment to protect their eyes.

The human eye has no pain receptors in it. So as you're killing the cells in the back of your eye, you won't feel a thing. Also... the effect isn't instant. After the damage is done, it can take between 24-48 hours for the cells to die. So you stare at the sun, felt no pain, think you got away with it and this "no staring at the sun" thing is all overblown... and you wake up 1 to 2 days later and realize you can't see (or your vision is severely degraded.)

The amount of time it takes to damage your eye depends on your age and how small your pupils can constrict. Young children might get away with a little over a minute. As we age our pupils won't constrict as much (which is why driving at night is more annoying than when we were young) and just 40 seconds may be enough to result in permanent damage. And since everyone is different... some people will get damage sooner than that.

So with that safety lecture out of the way...

When the sun is very low in the sky (sunrise & sunset) it's much safer. Point the camera away from the sun to take a meter reading because no matter what you use an exposure the sun will still be overexposed (so you're not really trying to get the right exposure for the sun... you're trying to get the right exposure for "everything else" in the image besides the sun.)

When we had our partial solar eclipse a few months back, I used a Thousand Oaks brand solar filter on my 300mm lens (this is a filter intended to go on the end of telescopes but I happen to own a size that nicely caps over the front of my 300mm lens). These filters allows about 1 photon out of every 100,000 to penetrate and render the sun at a safe level.

If you're interested in a source for safe solar filters, here's one: Solar Filters
(incidentally the filters go over the end of a telescope (or in my case I put it over a lens) like a "cap". You measure the outer diameter of the lens and make sure you order a size where the inner diameter is big enough to fit over (the inside is lined with felt to provide a snug fit and avoid scratching.)

BTW, that solar filter works out to about an ND 5.0 (16.66 stops of light reduction). But you can't use just "any" ND filter... it has to be formulated for the sun. The sun pumps out nearly as much damaging light in the IR spectrum as it does in the visible spectrum. Many modern filters use polymers that are just designed to block visible light and don't block the IR at all (there are cases of people ending up with damaged vision who actually did use filters that rendered the sun dim... but didn't use proper "solar" filters so they had no IR protection and cooked their retinas anyway.)

Meanwhile back to the camera... if the sun is high, I would be cautious about pointing the camera at it very long. I have a buddy who set up his LX200 to look at the sun and he did this with another buddy. While he was getting his scope ready, he put the solar filter on the front of the telescope, but he left his finder attached (with front and back caps on). What he DID NOT notice... was his buddy was busy taking off the all the caps. When he pointed the scope at the sun, it was there merely a few seconds and they both smelled the scent of burning plastic... look up and notice that the sun had torched a hole through the back cap of his finder scope. Why? Because his buddy removed the FRONT cap from that same finder scope. The finder is scope is an 8x50 (50mm aperture... 8x power). That was enough to burn a hole clean through the back cap (and also snap the wires that create the cross-hairs).

8x power on an APS-C size DLSR would be 232mm. So if you've got, say... a 50-250mm zoom lens, then when you zoom in you have roughly the same amount of power as this finder scope would have. Thanks to your reflex mirror, that energy isn't trying to burn a hole through your shutter and destroy your sensor. Instead... it's trying to burn a hole through your focusing screen.

Here's an image that my partner and I shot while I was doing a solar outreach for a local college during the last partial solar eclipse. I set up my camera and filter and had him track and snap away... while I continued to man a "white light" solar scope and a "Hydrogen alpha" solar scope.

This image is shot through a 300mm lens with a "white light" solar filter attached. The filter is tuned to allow more reds than other colors hence the orange colored sun, but we call it "white light" because it does allow full-spectrum. This is to differentiate it from images taken in narrow-band... such as a Hydrogen alpha solar scope (which only allows the 656nm wavelength to pass through the filter and all other wavelengths are blocked.)

 

[matthias bader]

Make it yourself easy: Look on the LiveView instead of the Viewfinder But if you don't stare at the sun through the Viewfinder, there will be no problem.

 

[Didereaux]

If what you want is details on the surface of the sun then you will need a filter. Go to any astronomy/camera supplier and look for solar filters. They come in sheets that you can cut to fit your lens or telescope. There are differing types depending upon which wavelengths you are filtering for.

 

[TCampbell]

If what you want is details on the surface of the sun then you will need a filter. Go to any astronomy/camera supplier and look for solar filters. They come in sheets that you can cut to fit your lens or telescope. There are differing types depending upon which wavelengths you are filtering for.

A simple solar filter (what we call a "white light" solar filter) allows you to see the sun's photosphere. On the photosphere you can see sunspots and some surface granulation. The more dramatic images showing prominences and filaments are in the chromosphere. To see the chromosphere you need a hydrogen-alpha filter but usually you don't get a hydrogen-alpha "filter" per se, you get a hydrogen-alpha solar telescope and connect the camera to it. These are very expensive.

Here's a link: Lunt Solar Systems | Here Comes the Sun!

Creating the image is a bit tricky because the exposure that will adequately expose the prominences will over-expose the surface (the "disk" of the sun). The exposure that will get the surface details nicely exposed will under-expose the prominences and you barely see them. So most solar imagers tend to take images at different exposures, then mask and combine them in photoshop to create the combined image of the sun with both surface and prominence detail.

I've never been particular good at imaging the sun so I asked some of the imagers who are good at it... and they tell me not to use a DSLR. They use a video capture camera. The Point Gray (e.g. Grasshopper III) or Imaging Source (e.g. DMK41) are popular.

You'll probably have a very hard time finding a camera store that carries solar filters. Generally you order these online. Thousand Oaks Optical is one of the more popular sources: Solar Filters They come in either glass or film (the film will not be tight... it'll be a bit wrinkled. Don't worry about that -- it won't show up in your images. To get the right diameter, measure the OUTER DIAMETER of the front of your lens (these things do not thread-on like typical filters... they go over the front of the lens like a cap.) Find their column labeled "OUTER CELL I.D." and find the filter which is closet to to your lens diameter noting that it must be LARGER than your lens diameter.

For example... my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens (which normally takes 77mm diameter thread-on photographic filters) actually has an 85mm outer diameter. That means I would have to order their 90mm diameter filter (that's the "OUTER CELL I.D.") so that it will fit over the front of the lens. That's obviously going to be loose, but they'll include felt strips (a "thin" strip and a "thick" strip) and you'll put one of these on the filter (probably the thicker one) as this padding will take up a few millimeters all the way around and you end up with a snug fit.

 

[ronlane]

Tim, you need a bigger softbox on that light, it's WAY too harsh. lol. Joking. That photo you posted looks really cool, nicely done.

 

[dennybeall]

I've heard people say they used a welders mask to shoot through to take sun pictures. Never tried it myself.

 

[TCampbell]

Tim, you need a bigger softbox on that light, it's WAY too harsh. lol. Joking. That photo you posted looks really cool, nicely done.

Funny you should mention that. I sometimes use it as an example of a "softbox placed too far away". The sun is 109 times wider than the Earth. That's a pretty wide "soft box". But as it's also 93 million miles away, it works more like a pin-point source.

It's not super apparent in the image, but that shot was captured just before sunset. The stuff that resembles cloud shadows at the bottom of the sun are actually trees.