Shooting the Eclipse: Saugus amateur photographer Charlie Zapolski captured the solar eclipse while on the back deck of his house

On Monday afternoon, Saugus’ amateur photographer Charlie Zapolski set up a tripod on the back deck of his house in hopes of capturing some good shots of the solar eclipse with his camera. Initially, Zapolski, a frequent contributor to The Saugus Advocate, said he had problems getting the right shot. He was getting too much light in his lens.

“When I first shot it, it wasn’t showing the black edge creeping over the sun,” Zapolski said. “I wasn’t getting the shadow,” he said.

“The first shots were too bright and the shadows got wiped out by the light,” he said. At that point, he went looking in his cellar for a dark piece of one-quarter-inch thick, doubled over plastic that saved the day – to hold in front of the camera lens of his Pentax digital single lens reflex 300.

“That little plastic made all the difference, just enough to give me the shadow I wanted,” he said.

“I held it in front of the camera lens and pressed the button,” he said.

Zapolski noted that the peak time for shooting the eclipse came from 3:25 p.m. to 3:28 p.m. He held a t-shirt to block the sun from his camera lens until he was able to line up the right shot. “I put the t-shirt over the lens of the camera. It allowed me to see the sun without hurting my eyes. Once I got the shot lined up, I took the t-shirt off,” he said.