There is a total solar eclipse crossing Europe on August 12, 2026. I am not chasing this one, but I have chased two, and I still think about them constantly. If you have never stood inside totality, here is a little of what the people in Spain and Iceland are about to experience.
I cried during my first total solar eclipse. I did not expect that.
It was 2017. My wife and I drove two days to get to Weiser, Idaho, slept in the back of my 4Runner, and set up in a spot I had scouted for the clearest view. When totality hit, something came over me that I still can not fully explain. I think it was feeling connected to every human who ever stood under one of these with no idea what was happening. Ancient people must have thought it was the end of the world, or the gods. Terror, confusion, awe. Standing there, I felt all of it.
Here is what the photos can not show you. The second totality hits, the temperature drops about twenty degrees almost instantly. The sky goes about 95 percent dark, like a moonless night in the middle of the day. Birds and animals get fooled and start making their night sounds. And you take off your glasses and look up with your naked eyes at a black hole in the sky where the sun used to be.
Then there is the light. At a normal sunset you get orange and pink on one horizon and deep blue on the other, because the sun only sets on one side. During totality you are standing inside the moon shadow, so you get 360 degrees of sunset all the way around you. I was not ready for that.
I almost blew the whole thing. You need a solar filter over your lens for the entire partial phase, and you only take it off for the couple of minutes of totality. I forgot to bring mine. So I grabbed a handful of the paper eclipse glasses people were using to watch, cut out the lenses, and taped them together into a filter over my lens. It actually worked. That taped-up mess is above.
We only had about three minutes, so I moved fast. I had a second camera on a tripod and a flash on each side of us, and my wife and I fired off a selfie of the two of us during totality, holding the flashes. One of my favorite frames I have ever made, and it almost did not happen.
The second chase was 2024. I was willing to go anywhere in the country and ended up in Bloomington, Indiana, purely because it had the lowest odds of cloud cover. Long drive, absolutely worth it. I shot both eclipses on a day rate for AFP, and the composites came out better than I hoped.
One thing I learned the second time around: if you zoom way in during totality and underexpose, you can actually capture the solar flares whipping off the sun around the edge of the moon. Seeing that come up on the back of the camera is insane.
The work from these chases ran on the BBC, Yahoo, and Sky at Night Magazine, and went out worldwide on the wire through AFP and Getty.
Most of my sun and moon work is quieter than this. I will spend hours, sometimes days, plotting exactly where to stand so the moon lines up behind a ridge, a bridge, or a person, anything that gives it scale. Usually I drive home with a single frame. Sometimes none. And sometimes something I never planned shows up, a bird, a cloud, a passing plane, and that turns out to be the shot. None of it is on assignment. It is just me leaning into something for the love of it.
The eclipses are the loudest version of that. Days of planning for three minutes you will never forget. Worth every mile.
See the full set in my Sun & Moon gallery.