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Monday, April 8 is the Great American Eclipse, so named because the area of totality
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will pass through Mexico, Texas, the Midwest, New England, and Canada. It'll be the last eclipse of its kind in the mainland United States for over 20 years
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If you want pictures of this momentous occasion, here are the eight things you can do to make sure
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you're prepared. So let's start with number one, get a tripod. You can take a better picture if you don't have to worry about
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holding your phone steady in your hands. Instead you can focus on the focus, the exposure
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and of course everything that's going on around you. If your phone is already lined up for the perfect
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shot sitting in a tripod. A compact tripod, like the Switch Easy, Easy selfie, is easy to carry in a bag
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and highly versatile. You can unfold it, extend it out, put your phone in, and set it at the right
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angle. And you can set it up on a picnic table, railing, or even just a chair. And
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You can buy it on the Cult of Mac store right here. A full-size tripod will of course be easier to set up at standing height
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I recommend this one because it has easy to adjust legs and it comes with a phone mount in the box
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And if you just have so much money to burn, you can get a really fancy tripod like this one with an adjustable panhead
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It also has supermetric adjustment knobs for getting it just perfectly lined up
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And better than that is a star tracker which will automatically follow the sun as it moves across the sky during the eclipse So number two if you have a tripod but you don have a way to mount your phone to it well I highly recommend the moment tripod mount for MagSafe
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Your phone just clamps to it and you screw it onto your tripod. It's that simple
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And because it's so tall, you can easily rotate your phone between portrait or landscape
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On the cheaper side of things, you can also get this. It's like $7
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It's not as nice because you have to, spin the screw and clamp your phone down onto it, but it'll work just as well
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So if you just want a good picture or video of daylight turning into darkness
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then this is all you'll need. But if you want a really good picture of the sun itself and the ring of fire around
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there are a few more things you're going to want to pick up. Like number three, a solar filter
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Now to be clear, looking directly at the sun will hurt your eyes
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but it won't hurt your phone. It'll just make it really hard
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to get a picture that isn't incredibly blurry. So what you're going to want to do is put a solar
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filter over your camera. Now the good news is if you have a pair of solar glasses, you already have one
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Just cut it up and tape it over the back. If you want something a little more purpose built
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you can buy these as well. Although keep in mind that during totality, you'll want to take the filter
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off because the white ring that you see, the corona of the sun, is much less bright
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and you don't need to wear solar eclipse glasses during this period either. Number four, if you want a really good picture of the sun
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you going to need a little more zoom than your phone will give you out of the box If you add a 2x telephoto zoom on top of an iPhone 15 Pro Max 5x zoom then you get a very impressive 10x optical zoom The moment telelens is the easiest way to get more
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zoom using their simple screw-on system. You have to buy one of these attachment pieces that fits
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inside one of their cases, the case then snaps onto your phone, and the telelens itself just rotates into place
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The T-series lens and attachment piece is compatible with newer phones with bigger cameras, the iPhone 13 and newer
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The M-series is compatible with the iPhone 13 and older. And yeah, it's a lot to buy, but when you have the whole system, you've effectively doubled the capability of your iPhone camera
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Number five, sometimes adding all this extra hardware, especially during the weird lighting conditions of a solar eclipse
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can confuse the iPhone's camera app, which tries to intelligently make a lot of these decisions for you
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If you want fine-tuned manual controls just like a full-size dedicated camera, you'll want an app like Halide, which lets you manually set resolution, lens, focus, exposure, and many more settings
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You tap the 1X button in the bottom corner to manually pick the telephoto lens
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You drag your finger up and down on the screen to set the exposure
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And if you drag the AF button out, you get manual focus controls
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For capturing an object in the sky, you just... drag it all the way to the end
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Halide packs in loads of pro features, but thanks to its intuitive design
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it's still really easy to figure out. You can get it for for a month for a year or lifetime If you click here to get it from the App Store Number six you can go the next level above a tripod and a zoom lens with an actual telescope
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This one from Celestron has a built-in solar filter, and they even offer a compatible phone
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mount that just snaps right into place, and even has a Bluetooth shutter button that you can just
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click to take a picture. Number seven, once you have everything set up just right, depending on what you're doing, it
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might actually be a little inconvenient tapping your phone screen to take the picture
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But if you have an Apple Watch, you can trigger it remotely. Open the camera remote app, and you can spin the digital crown to zoom in and out
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and tap the button to snap the photo with a three-second delay by default
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You can also even ask Siri, take a picture, and it'll snap the shot on your iPhone
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Now, this can be a little twitchy and unreliable, so you want to make sure that it's working and practice beforehand
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And that brings me to number eight, you should really practice ahead of time
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I mean, you see the sun every day, unless you live in Cleveland, so you can try out your lenses, your filters, your tripods, all of your equipment, so that you're not fumbling so much on the actual day of
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And keep in mind that the most memorable pictures and videos of the day will be of the people in the landscape around you
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Don't just take the same picture of the sun that everybody else is taking, get a selfie in front of it as well
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and another one of everybody wearing their epically cool solar eclipse glasses
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Also, remember to like and subscribe. I'm DeGraffin-Jones with Cult of Mac
