Hello, folks. I’m currently in Austin. Emee and I came down here late last week. While Emee always has an excuse to visit this Texas town, as she lived here before moving to Portland and still has friends here, this time we came here specifically because of the eclipse. While Portland was just outside the totality portion of the 2017 eclipse, I was stuck at work, only catching 97%. While this is still cool, I was very frustrated that I couldn’t see the whole thing. I’ve been fascinated by eclipses since being a young astronomy nerd. This frustration was one of the factors that I quit the hostel. And this frustration drove me to fly a couple thousand miles to specifically catch another one, especially since there won’t be another one on this continent for a couple decades.
But rather than just hang in Austin, we had to be a little more extra. Emee’s friend Laura has a cousin who lives on the Llano River about five miles outside of Mason, deep within Texas Hill Country. He was hosting a party on his spacious property, so we got to “camp” on it for a couple nights. The place was great, and Scott and Amelia were gracious hosts. This was the first time I really experienced this area and I found Hill Country to be beautiful.
While witnessing a total solar eclipse would not be a once in a lifetime experience for me (at least I hope not!) I knew it would be a while until I’d see another one. And while I knew the best thing would be to simply experience it as it happened, I wanted to at least make a stab at photographing it properly. A few months ago I was going to do that with one of my SLRs. But I knew that I would need a longer lens to do so. I took a chance on a generic 100-300mm zoom lens for the Minolta XD5, but it was complete bunk. (Thank you, eBay returns.) So of course, just like before my Tokyo trip a few months ago, I was stressing out about my options, going down a rabbit hole of searching eBay for another cheap telephoto lens of at least 300mm.
But then I had an epiphany that led me in another direction: I’d use the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ28. It could zoom almost to 500mm, a perfect focal length for what I wanted to do. And it also had filter threads for 46mm (sort of), so I got a solar filter (Neutral Density 16.5 stops!) and an appropriate step-up ring. Perfect! I didn’t bring a tripod as I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of flying with it, so I basically wung it and just aimed the camera towards the sun and fired away. I got a lot of bunk shots but a few keepers that I’m sharing below.
It was a great experience and I’m glad we went through the trouble of getting here. And I hope to see another one at some point. Emee and I are enjoying a few more days in Austin until we head back home to Portland. Stay tuned for more reports!
Urban Adventure League 
Stunning photos! Nice to hear about your visit to that part of the country. I lived in Austin for a few years.
thanks for sharing! I also went to Texas for the eclipse and have the same camera, but I wasn’t prepared to change settings, so only did a video of the surroundings before, during and after totality. I see the settings in flickr, but where do you access all of those? I tried scrolling through the menu but can’t find those exact icons. I want to be ready for the next one!
Thanks, Mari. Those “settings” is basically what the camera recorded at time of photograph. I just had it in Intelligent Auto, so I wasn’t doing anything with the settings during shooting.
Wow how interesting, I just saw one of these cameras in a thrift store the other day and of course you were the only person pretty much to have ever talked about it, just like the XD5. I will probably purchase now. Good to see it had some use for you
It’s a perfectly fine camera, especially if you find it for free. I don’t know if I’d specifically go and seek this one out, though.