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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

shooting at the sun? Help!

Raul Gonzo

Raul Gonzo

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Hey everyone- I am on a shoot & we need to shoot a time lapse pointed at the sun as it sets (roughly 2 hours). We have a .6 ND & a .6 ND grad.
Is this okay or will they camera be damaged?
 
It's not OK, you are liekly to damage the sensor.

If you don't get the result you are looking for, send me an email at pawel.achtel (at) 24x7.com.au and see if I can help. :Angel_anim:
 
My thought is that if you have enough attenuation of the light (in the form of ND filters plus stopped-down aperture) so that the brightest part of the sun is only (for example) a few stops overexposed, then that should not be enough to damage the sensor (although I don't know if your 0.6 ND + 0.6 grad is enough for that.) EDIT: I should also note I'm assuming you're at a standard shutter; if you are at 1/1000 sec shutter, that implies a lot more light is hitting the sensor, and you are more into danger.)

In other words, I can't believe the sensor physical damage threshold is only a few stops above a full white reading. If you wanted the sun to be dramatically, way-overexposed in the frame (lots of flare & diffraction spikes, etc.) that's more likely to be dangerous.

One note, your ND filters normally allow excess infrared (IR) through, so you probably want an IR filter (hot mirror) in addition, both for sensor protection and a cleaner image.

I should also say, I'm not offering to replace your camera if I'm wrong :-).
 
Thanks Pawel & John- I had the feeling it wasn't safe- but here is what I concluded:

I closed the iris almost all the way (landscape anyway) and I put the two NDs on. The histogram wasn't clipping- so it seemed okay.
I was shooting a timelapse - 1 frame - 16 second intervals, so I blocked the sun after each frame was shot until the sun was halfway beyond the horizon, then the light decreased quite a bit so I let it ride.

When I got home, I didn,t have that purple dot in front of the sun- meaning the sensor wasn't in need of protection.

If anyone from Red is reading this, can they shed some light (no pun intended) on whether this was an okay solution?
 
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