After the solar eclipse was over and I had spent a couple of days reflecting on the experience, I had a thought that really should have occurred to me at any point in the last few years. A solar filter is just as handy when wanting to photograph the sun without an eclipse as with. I therefore decided to have a go at taking some sun shots. Of course, as soon as I thought of this, it got cloudy. That didn’t last too long, though, so I was able to experiment with varying exposure to get some images.

The first thing I liked was the clarity of the sunspots. They really had some definition to them. This was a nice quick win. Then I saw some texture in the other parts of the sun. Going with under and overexposure allowed me to see if this made a difference in how well things showed up. It might not be easy to see in these images but hopefully there is something you can make out.