It's a shame that Lens Rentals had to suffer such material loss, but that report is absolute gold-plated first-hand evidence for my perennial debates with other photographers who insist that they don't need Solar protection for eclipses.
"But I took a landscape shot at midday with the Sun in frame and it didn't melt my sensor". The difference being the length of exposure and the concentrations of energy.
Just to clarify, there’s no concentration of energy involved with the eclipse itself. The concentration involved is no different than setting a leaf on fire with a magnifying glass on a regular day.
The sun isn’t a garden hose. Putting something in front of it doesn’t make the edges more intense.
There kind of is, because it's darker when the sun is partially covered, so you'll use a larger aperture or longer exposure than you would normally. This is also why it's more dangerous to look at the sun during an eclipse than it is normally: your iris opens wider during an eclipse because it's not as bright.
I think you misunderstood his point, which was: there is no more energy coming from the sun at any given point during the eclipse than in a clear day. The sun isn't "sending" more energy on the path that aren't blocked, nor is the energy blocked going around the obstacle and concentrating on the areas still visibles.
The reason for the damage is entirely due to the receiver behaving/being differently, be it your eyes or your camera, because they get tricked into thinking it's dark and they act like it, being much more receptive and then overwhelmed.
"tricked into thinking it's dark" is kind of misleading, because it is in fact darker, but for some reason unknown to me there the energy from the sun harms you as much. I thought the issue with looking at its sun was its brightness, but i guess it isn't?
During a partial eclipse, part of the sun is hidden behind the moon. So the overall amount of light reaching the ground around you is indeed less, in direct proportion to the amount of sun that is eclipsed.
For example, if 90% of the sun is covered by the moon, then only 10% of the usual amount of sunlight will light up the area around you. So it is quite a bit darker than usual.
However, the portion of the sun that is still visible is just as bright as it would be on any other similar day. If you stare at that remaining portion of the sun, or aim a camera at it, it will cause the same damage as it would any other time, only in a smaller crescent-shaped area instead of a full circle.
The danger to your eyes is even greater, because the overall darkness tricks your irises into opening up wider and letting even more light in than usual.
You're pretty unlikely to stare at the sun for 30 seconds on a normal day. But people do that during a partial eclipse, and that's the problem. Similarly, people don't usually aim their cameras directly at the sun with the lens wide open and no solar filter - except during an eclipse.
A total eclipse is quite a different thing, of course. During totality, the sun's bright photosphere is completely hidden, and only the much fainter corona is visible. This is only about as bright as a full moon, and it's perfectly safe to take pictures with any lens, and to observe directly with the naked eye - even with binoculars.
That's one of the best explanations I heard about why and how the eye damage can occur. I'm curious how far can you carry that reasoning: If 99.9999999% of the sun were covered during a partial eclipse (down to a single stream of photons), does it damage one single rod on my retina as opposed to a crescent-shaped region? I'm guessing that a single stream of photons from the sun doesn't have enough energy to do any damage.
Anecdotally, I viewed the 1979 total eclipse with binoculars (and no filters), and at the end of totality I continued to look through them for a few seconds to see the diamond ring and Baily's beads.
It didn't harm my vision at all, even though there was some fair amount of direct sunlight coming through by then. But it was only a few seconds. The duration of sun exposure certainly is a factor.
The issue is how much light gets focused onto a small area of your retina. When the sun is partially eclipsed, the darkness makes your iris open up to let more light in. That then focuses more light from the visible part of the sun onto the same area of retina.
Your iris reacts to visible wavelengths and not ultraviolet wavelengths. So your iris is open much wider than it ought to be given the amount of UV present (especially given that UV is much more damaging than visible). If you see what I mean :)
> because they get tricked into thinking it's dark and they act like it
This is a really bad example :DDD
I don't think that is totally true for human eye. You can test it by putting a LED spotlight in front of you at night, and have someone else check your pupil before and after you turn on the LED (And remember test it in different distances).
Camera works differently, they have multiple ways (Metering Modes) to test the brightness of a scene. So how it work will depends on the selected Metering Mode.
And camera can collect more light by letting light keep entering the light sensor for longer time. Plus, bigger lens can also collect more light, some people may even mount their camera on a telescope, thus more light entering. So maybe this is the physical reason why so many gears got destroyed?
I understood the point just fine. My point is that there is a greater concentration of energy which is what causes damage, it just happens in the optics rather than at the source.
i was always wondering how a pin hole protects you, and i mean im sure i could have looked it up but just, really wasnt important. dude that tid bit made my day - the more you know
Dingaling is talking about the light being concentrated on certain areas of the sensor. Because the total/average brightness is low, the exposure ends up being much longer then at normal conditions, causing damage to the areas where the light is concentrated. Under normal conditions, the light will be less concentrated on certain spots, so even though there is much more light in total, the camera will choose an appropriate exposure that will prevent damage to the sensor.
The irradiance is determined by the aperture, which is measured relative to the focal length. So with e.g. f/2 you get the same heating of a given area of the sensor regardless of the focal length (i.e. "zoom").
Put differently, longer lenses typically also have bigger absolute apertures, collecting incident light from a larger cross-section. This compensates for the fact that a given solid angle of incident light is spread over a larger area of the sensor.
They have an in-house repair shop that dealt with most or all of it, and they charge the customer for the cost of the repair. From the comments the fact that they don't gouge on repairs is one reason some folks use them.
I'm only a reluctant amateur photographer, but my understanding is that damaged sensors cannot be repaired, and that manufacturers will quote repair costs totalling or exceeding the cost of an entirely new camera.
Seems it eventually worked for him, after several attempts to adjust the position to get correct focus,
but if you read the comments on the video there are many people who've messed up their camera trying to do this.
They might send that back to the manufacturer to fix.
In the Reddit thread, they talked about replacing the aperture module for some of the lenses; that's just a simple swap, along with cleaning the adjacent elements.
I wish the blog post had talked more about that. I'm curious about their repair process. What capabilities do they have in house? Can they replace a broken sensor?
They blog a lot about their repairs process in general. It's primarily mechanical damage to lenses they appear to normally deal in - the focusing rings, aperture mechanisms or realigning optical elements dislodged by drops and so on. An embedded CCD/CMOS sensor is probably a full logic board replacement I'd assume, as opposed to some kind of sensor only replacement, given it's almost always soldered on.
There are a lot of things that a professional repair shop focused on a particular type of equipment may be able to do that aren't practical for anyone else - including manufacturer repair facilities. Louis Rossman is a bit entertaining on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ocF_hrr83Oc
Yup, it all came down to how long the camera was pointed at the sun. I took a bunch of photos of the eclipse including this HDR shot with a Leica 280mm lens and Sony A7R with no filter whatsoever & without any damage to my lens or camera. The thing is, it took seconds to take and I made sure the camera was only pointed at the sun for brief moments:
I was in North Eastern Idaho and there is a similar looking contrail visible in my wide angle shots at totality so if the point of image capture happened to be just right it would be possible to have it in the frame with the sun.
At Lick Observatory, they close the slit in the roof before repositioning during daytime observation (yes, that is a thing) to avoid even the chance of running into Mr. Sun.
Yeah, if you use a super-telephoto lens, then take your camera body off and change the focal point so that you are using your lens as a magnifying glass like they did in the video. No doubt. For the rest of the sane world; however, it's not quite that risky. For reference, that Leica I used in my shot is a one of a kind as it was the first lens to roll off the line when Leitz branding was changed to Leica & estimated to be worth between $12,000 to $22,000. I wouldn't have risked it if there was any risk whatsoever.
The flux for the sun on the sensor/film/whatever is:
Φ/4α² * 1/A²
Where Φ is the sun flux at the surface of the earth, and α is the angular diameter of the sun. A is the f-number of the lens, the only variable in this equation. It doesn't depend on focal length.
The total power over the film is:
Φ/4πα * f²/A²
which does depend on focal length, but that is usually not the determinant factor, as for surface burns the damage depends mostly on the flux.
Surface damage mostly depends on the power density, not on total power, so it depends mostly on the aperture, not on the focal length. This makes longer focal lengths safer to point at the sun because they are slower lenses. They are also safer if you don't explicitly point them at the sun because they are less likely to catch the sun in the smaller field of view.
Burned shutter cloths on Leica M series cameras with wide angle lenses is a real problem that can happen simply if you leave the camera without a lens cap lying on a table. This is less of a problem on most other cameras, as they use metal shutter curtains.
To satisfy your curiosity, he did not. The lens was borrowed from his workplace (a camera store) for the purpose of the video, and was returned unharmed.
They still probably lose out on some revenue until a replacement is in stock. Having a working lens is always better for business than getting reimbursed to buy a replacement lens. (That's the nature of the business, though.)
LensRentals do all possible repairs internally, so I suspect that the downtime on an expensive lens like that is minimal if possible. Roger mentioned on the photography subreddit that the aperture replacement was a $200 part and 3 to 4 hours -- it only took so long because it was that tech's first time replacing that part.
He mentions in the article they rented out “thousands” of lenses. I’m guessing the few lenses they have to repair because of this is barely over their normal repair load.
It's like denying you murdered somebody when you sent the police the murder weapon with your fingerprints in the victim's blood. Unless you're OJ Simpson, you're going to jail.
(For those unfamiliar - it works this way because the objective element of this lens is far larger than anyone makes filters for. 52mm is a very common diameter, so placing a drop-in mount further along in the focal path means you can use a wide range of filters with minimal cost and inconvenience, and to identical effect - except, of course, in the rare case where you have enough energy coming down the barrel to damage the iris.)
hey astronomy was a wicked hard class and i still dont get it, so maybe this will be a very expensive lesson for them. sadly it probably wont be the right one but that is life. you know that there had to be a couple of smug asshats that were brought down a peg, thats pretty funny. I missed the eclipse.
At one point during the eclipse I used a pair of binoculars to project an image of the sun onto the ground. Of course, it was a double image, so to fix that I covered one of the eyepieces with my hand. It took about three seconds for the pain to register. Hard to say which hurt more: the small, first-degree burn on my palm or the rest of me from kicking myself afterwards.
I think my favorite part of this article is how the author is so understanding and positive about his users. I think if I had rented out cameras to people, told them not to point it at the eclipse, and then got a bunch of damaged cameras back, I'd be pissed. In fact, I might have choice words for those customers.
I think there's a lesson here in targeting inexperienced consumers. Perhaps a good preventative measure would have been handing out protective lenses before the eclipse so that customers would have really had to try to mess it up.
IANAPhotographer, but many other rental businesses (cars, boats, bicycles, etc.) make lots of money on overcharging for repair/theft. It wouldn't shock me to learn that camera rentals are the same.
It could also be that these people renting out camera equipment are guaranteed to have seen much worse damage, expected worse damage - and that in this instance - the customers appears to have taken responsibility for the damage to an unusual extent.
There's certainly enough positive surprises in the above to warrant an upbeat post, one that can also be used to educate about how camera systems can be damaged, and the limits of their insurance.
Ha ha I was thinking the same thing. Wouldn't surprise me if they had some of the article written / drafted in advance. Excellent PR and free advertising.
I'd argue this is slightly worse because the cameras have higher magnification lenses* vs our naked eye. This might be more akin to looking into a telescope with your eyes.
Edit: To elaborate - Higher magnification lenses (depending on the camera lens used of course)
Edit 1: - /u/corndoge Suggests that people may take this the wrong way. I mean to say in the amount of physical damage it's worse for camera's because of the extra (and typically higher magnification lens). I don't mean that a burnt camera is worse then a burnt eye - I'd rather anybody loose tons of $$$ for a camera then have eye damage.
It's not so much about the magnification as it is about the light-gathering surface. The human eye has a relatively small aperture; a professional camera lens has a huge aperture, and it focuses all the light from there onto the camera sensor.
Higher magnification actually makes it slightly safer, because the image of the sun ends up magnified and spread out over a larger part of the sensor. Low magnification means it all goes to one point.
Could somebody tell me why this comment is being downvoted? I didn't feel like I was being rude (I'm sorry if I was), and I'm pretty sure it's a correct statement.
Our eyes have lenses but as /u/jmiserez said the lenses in the cameras lenses magnify it far more. It'd be like us looking into a telescope looking at the sun (Obviously depends on which camera lens you use).
Edit: I edited the main comment to explain that the difference is that camera's typically have higher magnification lens then our eyes.
Focal length has nothing to do with it, in fact, longer focal lengths are generally safer because lenses are slower. Aperture is what matters, lenses gather much more light than our bare eyes.
Is the issue aperture or aperture over focal length? The actual aperture (squared) determines how much solar energy you are gathering. The aperture over focal length (again squared) determines the energy per surface unit.
But it’s not a 600mm tele, so the actual area of burn damage is going to be smaller. You’ll still have a blind spot in the center of your field of view, but not the whole eye. Still, I imagine it’s quite a disability either way.
This is well written and accessible article. Thanks for the link. One of the best short lay descriptions of light that I have come across: "Light is a form of electromagnetic energy. Electromagnetic radiation has a dual wave-particle nature. When light is absorbed by a photoreceptor, its particle nature is important."
I was recently party to a conversation where someone was saying that they couldn't find eclipse glasses in the store, so they had to "look through a Ritz cracker, like they said on the news". I figured they meant use it as a pinhole lens, but they continued saying that the sun was still pretty bright even using the cracker. I didn't want to blow up the spot by clarifying/correcting (and it's not like I could have prevented their eye damage after the fact), but I definitely got the sense they were looking directly through the holes in the cracker. This person is an educated white-collar professional.
Erm, your comment makes me think you didn't quite get what I was saying.
Using the holes in a Ritz cracker as a pinhole lens to focus the sun on a sheet of paper seems eminently fine, as you're only subtracting sun from the case of looking at the paper outside (as opposed to using a glass lens to image the sun, which gathers light from more angles and concentrates it). It seems like poorer optical quality given its thickness, but could be handy if you don't have access to a piece of paper and a staple, or if you're a clickbait journalist trying to entertain a dying audience.
Looking through the hole is idiotic. It'll cut down on some of the light sure, but nowhere near the attenuation required - a quick search shows a #13 welding shade lets through about 10^-5 of the light.
I just googled for reports on the eclipse's aftermath the other day, and there seemed to be noting about widespread eye damage (or I did not search hard enough).
It was interesting how most of the post-eclipse reporting was hijacked by a certain politician not wearing his glasses (probably he only looked for a split second anyway). Anyway, this eclipsed (sorry) any reports about the actual event, which must have been one of the largest events in history based on the number of spectators (I saw estimates of 20 million people across the US).
Apples and oranges. Eyes are wet, lenses dry. Eyes would never catch fire. Boil maybe. The damage to eyes happens at far lower temps/times and, as many have found the hard way, it doesnt even hurt.
FWIW me and my coworkers looked at the eclipse with no protection (it was too foggy to use our pinhole cameras). I didn't develop any vision issues, and I don't think the others did either.
Watch out over the next couple of months, and don't rub your eyes if you think they feel like they have sand in them, just go to the doctor. There was a reddit thread about people who damaged eyes after looking at an eclipse, and several of them showed effects later.
It's funny that after hearing dozens of warnings about how looking at the sun will permanently hurt your eyesight, people GO and actually LOOK at the sun without protection. I suppose stupidity has no limits?
Same here. So much fog cover in SF that you couldn’t even see it through eclipse glasses. Normal sunglasses were just perfect and naked eye was okay for a few seconds at a time.
I mostly looked at it through the display on my camera though. Didn’t even cross my mind it could cause damage. Luckily it didn’t
Absolutely, I know it's not just a myth. It's just that whether you need eclipse glasses is more nuanced than "always wear them." If you're going to stare at an eclipse for multiple seconds on a cloudless day you're probably going to be in for a world of hurt.
Staring at the Sun is bad, no matter when you do it. The Sun emits no extra photons during an eclipse. Your pupils do expand due to physiological responses of the decreased light, however.
In San Francisco the eclipse was only partial and behind a cloud of fog. In that case looking at it's no worse than looking at the sun behind a cloud on a non-eclipse day.
Interesting! My assumption is that this could not happen with a phone camera though, correct? Because then one would think just leaving one's phone face down on the table in sunlight would ruin it.
The sun would have to be dead center middle so it's probably unlikely. The lenses on the fancy cameras definitely make it a far worse problem for them vs our phone cameras though.
An iphone 6 camera only costs 5$ and is easy to replace(with a screw driver and spudger (maybe an igizmo) most hacker news people likely wouldn't have issues.), so it's not the end of the world (source:I repair phones)
Most people don't mount their cell phones to tripods or celestial tracking mounts so there's enough movement it would never be an issue. It would be interesting to mount one to a celestial tracking mount and see what happens. Honestly, I've got some old cell phones laying around here and might just give that a try.
That would be really cool to see! /u/tzs posted some links, so it looks like people a somewhat unsure. I'm guessing that if the sun is well tracked in the center for long enough that it would damage the lens. I guess we don't have a ton of hard data for it.
So I've photographed lasers a bunch and burned a few sensors, I guess I should toss in my experience. As far as I can tell, it really depends on the specific phone that you're using, and also the damage is usually fairly minimal. I've damaged fancy sensors with lasers and they almost always have major problems afterwards, but for years I used a phone with a very severe amount of laser damage to the sensor and the photos were quite good and the damage was barely noticeable (as a series of black lines on the image.) There was no damage to the lens.
I also doubt it would be the lens damaged in the case of a smartphone. The lenses are built to take a tremendous amount of abuse and almost certainly would be fine. The sensors are by far the more fragile component.
The most common expert opinion seems to be that photographing the Sun with a smartphone camera won't damage it. Here's a NASA document on this: [1]
A Chicago Tribune story [2] cited the WSJ [3] saying that Apple said that eclipse photography would not hurt an iPhone.
Forbes says that recent generations of iPhone have sensors and lenses just big enough to cause damage if you point them at the Sun for more than a couple seconds, but that selfies that include the Sun are fine because the front camera and sensor are small [4].
>Forbes says that recent generations of iPhone have sensors and lenses just big enough to cause damage if you point them at the Sun for more than a couple seconds, but that selfies that include the Sun are fine because the front camera and sensor are small [4].
i don't buy it. phones get their rear cameras pointed towards to the sun all the time. all it takes is you putting the phone on its back out in the sun. you'd be hearing thousands of reports iphone cameras mysteriously getting damaaged. not to mention that it's not really forbes saying that, it's some blogger that forbes sold its name to (a practice they're infamous for)
Not really, the light flux is not really related to the physical aperture (diameter of the lens), but rather to the f-number of the lens (what photographers usually call "aperture" is in fact the f-number, focal length divided by lens aperture), an iPhone has an f/1.7 lens. This is an extremely fast lens, faster than any any zoom on a DSLR. Only dedicated prime lenses are faster.
The flux is:
Φ/4α² * 1/A²
Total energy does depend on actual aperture though. Total power is:
Φ/4πα * D²
Where D is a diameter of the lens.
As a first approximation, the sensor can support a certain flux, but once that regime is exceeded the damage is proportional to the energy, not to the flux. So if we talk about the regime where the sensor is not destroyed, flux is the relevant metric, but a larger lens will likely cause more damage once damage actually occurs.
This is just theoretical pontification, but I think there is a respect in which size matters: heat dissipation. Suppose you have a sensor laminated to a heat sink. If you apply some flux density (power per unit area) to a very small area (as would happen with a phone camera), you can dissipate heat in three dimensions: back toward the heat sink and to the sides through the rest of the sensor. If, in contrast, you apply the same flux density to a large area, the edge effects matter less and you approach the limit where heat only dissipates straight back. This could have a dramatic effect on the temperature.
A similar effect happens in the kitchen. It's very easy to burn yourself by touching a large hot surface, but it's much harder to burn yourself by touching a hot pointy thing.
Anyone who doesn't take their glasses off and look at the total eclipse for a moment when the sun is completely covered, is missing out. It's a beautiful sight.
Caution is needed of course. Get ready to put those glasses back on any moment now!
Incredible hues and glow and the surrounding twilight. Can't see any of that with glasses on. At totality, sneak a peek with your naked eyes, it's fine.
Same for camera equipment, it's the setting up and pointing the camera at sun before the eclipse that does the damage. Keep lens cap on until last moment, then take off, and nothing will happen to camera. I've done it at two eclipse festivals, no clouds, didn't even use ND filter! Cameras and eyes fine.
I got lucky while testing my camera, which is mounted at prime focus in a refractor scope. I had it in Live View which meant the mirror was up, and I removed the solar filter for just a second.
The camera said "error", turned off, I replaced the solar filter, and it was fine. Much longer, and I'd have had a burn. The telescope really collects and concentrates a ton of light.
No, a slower lens (higher f-number, or, actually, T-number) is safer than a faster lens. It's only a practical accident that a long "telephoto" lens is usually significantly slower than a lens closer to normal for the format (and that the long end of a consumer zoom is usually slower than the wide end). A 600mm f/4 lens is an eye-wateringly expensive hulking monster; a 50mm f/1.8 lens is the proverbial cheap-as-chips (with some exceptions), but will let about 5-6 times the amount of light through to be imaged on the sensor - it'll burn a smaller hole, but do it much more quickly. Should you be able too find a 600mm lens with the same T-number (similar to the f-number, but taking transmissivity losses into account), it'll do the job just as quickly, but much more thoroughly.
I can almost feel the LensRental writer's pain of having to write this article without calling a bunch of dumbaxxes dumbaxxes because they are their customers. sigh
Does the eclipse make the sun stronger or something? I've pointed my camera at the sun for all day long taking timelapses and nothing bad happened to it. I guess maybe you need a really hardcore zoom lens to get damage like that...
On the day of this event I was at the hospital and everyone just used X-ray films. They work well enough. I also did try a pair of sunglasses, and I could last maybe for a second or two. I am not sure if my eye sights have been damaged since then. I hope not... I repeated a few times but all done around 1pm-ish in NY, so not at peak. It was more like looking directly at the sun during noon everyday.
Most people don't buy expensive screw-on types like these for a one-time event. You buy some solar filter film and fabricate yourself a lens cover out of cardboard for about $10.
I was shooting with a d800 200mm lens, no filter. There is no visible sensor damage, both when examining images and the sensor itself. I have to check out the lens. I left it on the sun for a good 20 minutes in live view but there doesn't seem to be any damage. Thoughts?
A lot of phone cameras seem to have come through (apparently) unscathed. Both pictures and video. Too small a collector/concentrator, or enough shaking because hand-held to keep the focal point moving?
The amusing bit is at the end, where the author tacitly admits that their add-on camera insurance is somewhat crap. Someone who damaged a rental camera by pointing it at the eclipse would, ironically, have been better off if they then proceeded to "accidentally" drop the camera from a height onto concrete:
Unfortunately, these types of damage are considered neglect, as warnings were given out to customers before the solar eclipse. Our LensCap insurance plan, which can be added to rentals for a small nominal fee, does not protect from neglect but is an excellent tool for those who are worried about their rental and want to protect themselves from any accidental damage.
Intentionally using gear inappropriately in ways that are highly likely to result in damage isn't what insurance is for. Reasonable guidelines around what insurance will cover keeps it cheaper for everyone.
A camera is repairable, so it's not like they throw out the entire "broken" item. Dropping the camera would have just created a second problem.
It's an interesting line, between accident and neglect. Reading the article, my initial reaction was that it is ridiculous for their insurance to not cover this damage. But yet in general I do enjoy the non-diligent actually retaining some moral hazard. This "absent agency" problem is usually addressed with a deductible, but that still doesn't fully price in the cost of easily-prevented damage.
Recently renting a box truck and not wanting to be on the hook for a $150k piece of capital equipment, I got the damage waiver. But I had wished for a cheaper policy that would have excluded damage from low drive-throughs and parking garages, which presumably makes up the majority of their claims. Alas.
Erm, do you mean "worse" as in more money to repair a dropped camera (new body, realigning lenses, etc), or worse if there were two separate problems? In the second case, I'm guessing the repair technician would say "In addition to being dropped, the image sensor is also burnt", and the camera shop would say "okay, looks like you burnt the sensor with the eclipse, and then most likely dropped the camera on purpose", and would cover nothing.
In general, insurance relies heavily on intent. Intentionally breaking the camera on the ground would not be covered. Gross negligence (like ignoring the warning of the camera shop and proceeding to burn the sensor) is interesting because to the person doing it it feels like an accident, yet to most everyone else it feels like they didn't try hard enough not to.
many of those depicted lenses and camera bodies have metal exteriors/frames. ignoring the glass, they'd probably still be in a single piece after 200m. and without any obviously melted bits.
"But I took a landscape shot at midday with the Sun in frame and it didn't melt my sensor". The difference being the length of exposure and the concentrations of energy.