Eleven Frames, Two Weeks Later

The card came out of the camera in northern Spain on the twelfth and went into a drawer in a bag with the filters, and it stayed there while I did ordinary things and answered messages about it and said I had not looked yet.

That is not modesty and it is not exhaustion. While the card is closed, the two minutes and eighteen seconds are what I remember, and what I remember is enormous. Open it, and the two minutes become eleven frames with exposure values attached, and one of those things replaces the other permanently and you do not get to choose which way round.

I have lost an event this way before. There is a totality in 2019 I can no longer recall independently — I can only recall my photographs of it, which are technically fine and which have overwritten the thing itself.

So the fortnight is deliberate now. Two weeks of remembering it without evidence, written down first, in words, badly, on the flight home. Then the card.

I opened it on Wednesday night, at the kitchen table, with the lights off, which is not necessary for any technical reason and which I did anyway.

Eleven frames. Two are excellent. Three are usable. Six are the reason people say photographing totality is a mistake, and they are that for the ordinary reason, which is that I was looking at a screen during the most extraordinary ninety seconds of the year.

The words I wrote on the flight are four hundred and something and they are not good writing. They have the temperature in them, and the fact that the birds on the ridge stopped, and a note that the woman next to me said something in a language I do not speak twice, at the same moment, in the same tone. None of that is on the card. None of it could have been.

The plan was the corona. It is always the corona. It is the thing that is impossible to photograph well, which is exactly why everybody points a camera at it, and my nine planned frames are nine competent versions of an image that exists in better form from better equipment in a hundred thousand places.

The first accident is the frame before. Bracket one, fired early, at the wrong exposure, and it caught the last light going along the ridge to the west while the sky above was already dark. It is not sharp. It is the only photograph I have ever taken that looks like what that moment feels like.

The second is worse technically and better still. It is the group of people about forty metres from me, from behind, all facing the same way, none of them holding a camera, and it is out of focus because it was never meant to be a photograph — it is the frame where I knocked the tripod turning round.

I have written about this in this paper for two years and I still set up for the corona every time. The interesting frame is never the object. It is always the light on something ordinary, or the people, and I know it, and I will do exactly the same in 2027.

The honest reason is not that I forget. It is that the corona is the frame you can plan, and planning is what you do with the eleven months in between, and by the time you are standing there the plan is most of what you have brought with you. Nobody drives four hours and gets on a plane in order to improvise.

The two accidents took no skill at all. They took being there with a camera already pointing at something, which is the only technique anybody has ever needed and the one you cannot rehearse in a dark room at home.

The mount tracked. The intervalometer fired. The filter came off cleanly at second contact and went back on at third, which is the part I rehearse in a dark room at home like a person with a problem.

The head torch was new. Red mode, bought in July, never used in the field, and it defaults to white on power-up and requires two presses to get to red. In the dark, cold, and with about forty seconds of margin, I put white light across my own dark adaptation and across the four people nearest me, who were extremely gracious about it.

This is the oldest rule in the hobby and I broke it on the smallest item in the bag. You do not take untested equipment to something that happens for two minutes and eighteen seconds.

The mount cost forty times what the torch cost and I tested the mount for three weeks. Nobody has ever ruined an eclipse with a mount.

Everything is set before second contact. The intervalometer runs the sequence. My hands do one thing, which is the filter, and then they are done and the rest belongs to the timer.

I have written this resolution before, twice, in this paper, and broken it both times, because the impulse to check the back of the camera during totality is not a decision — it arrives fully formed and your hand is already moving.

So the change is mechanical rather than moral. The screen gets taped over. Not turned off, which is reversible by a person in a state of excitement. Taped, with gaffer, before I leave the hotel.

Two minutes and eighteen seconds was this year's. The next one I can reach is shorter. I have eleven frames from Spain and two of them are good, and neither of the two is worth ninety seconds of the only thing I actually went there for.