Review on 📷 77mm Threaded Black Polymer Solar Camera Filter for Enhanced SEO by Michael Hemmig

I bought this filter in preparation for the 21st August 2017 solar eclipse. I plan to shoot with a crop sensor (7D II or 80D) and a 70-200 f/2.8L IS II or 300mm f/4L lens with a 1.4x extender. Both use 77mm filters. I tested it today on my 5D Mark IV and it works very well. First a little background. I bought this filter on Roger Clark's recommendation on his website. As an MIT-trained engineer, he knows what he's talking about. There is a lot of talk about using 10-stop ND filters to capture the sun. This is a bad idea for two reasons: 1. 10 levels will only block sunlight 1024 times (2^10). You need at least 100 times more to be sure.2. The neutral density filter is designed to block visible light; You don't know what its infrared transmission is, and if you mount it on a telephoto lens you run the risk of sealing your sensor, or worse your eyes, if you look directly at the sun through such a filter for a long period of time. This particular filter, with an optical density of 5, blocks light by a factor of 10^5, or 100,000 (16.6 stops, which is Log_2(100,000)). Just as importantly, it also effectively blocks IR and you can find the transmission curve on Roger's website. sufficient contrast in the sun for autofocus to work; If this is the case, first manually focus on the distant object using Live View (the moon has enough surface detail for this to work well) and then use the same focus position for the sun. However, my 5D IV was able to focus using the contrast between the sun itself and the sky. For the exposure, I simply underexposed until the highlights were clipped. To see fine details like tiny sunspots, you need to make sure you're using a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the Earth's motion. At 10x Live View, this movement is very visible in the form of the sun's apparent movement across the sky and needs to be accounted for for maximum detail. and take my original lens cap. Overall I am happy with my purchase and looking forward to August 21st. Updated June 2017: I've attached a newer photo that shows the sunspots better. They match real-time images taken by NASA's Soho satellite at the time I took the image. Shot on my 70-200 with a 1.4 x 280mm extension. This is a 574 x 583 pixel still image of the original 30 megapixel image. A crop sensor with a focal length of 300 mm and a 1.4x extender brings significantly more pixels to the subject.