Can you please ask Brian what camera, lens and film he uses to shoot the eclipse?
This is a characteristically late response, but I'd love to get into it. I got into film photography by picking my dad's childhood brownie hawkeye off of a shelf and ever since then i've stayed pretty cheap with the hobby. I got a really good deal on a Kiev-80 a couple years ago. For those who don't know, its a 50 year old soviet camera made as an imitation of a Hasselblad (the camera we took to the moon). It's a medium format camera, so focal lengths work a little different than they do in 35mm
Medium format cameras like this take pictures that are 60mm by 60mm. Your typical 35mm camera takes 36mm by 24mm frames, so the added film sixe here means generally everything has to get bigger. The lenses i've gotten for this camera all have massive cases and can be carried with their own separate strap. The lens used for the eclipse is just... so big. oh my god. it's a mess. It's a Tair-33, with a minimum f stop of 4.5 and a focal length of 300mm (equivalent to 165mm on 35)
This model of the lens has very fun, characteristic stripes, the aperture control is all the way at the front, and easy to use. Focusing, however is slow, as the weight of everything creates quite a bit of friction. You can get one of these for about $80 bucks. Now 300mm here is not a great magnifier, so I also got a (faulty) accessory to extend the focus, bringing the lens to 600mm (330mm equivalent in 35). It also makes this camera, all put together, into The Largest Object of All Time.
squash and butter for scale
To see the difference between 300mm and 600mm, check out these photos of the regular, non-eclipsed sun at both lengths
You're probably wondering why these pictures look so weird. these lenses are don't have very effective coatings. you wouldn't believe the processes that go into coating your glasses, your camera lenses, your phone lenses. The easiest kind of picture to take is one where your subject is lit by a souce that is behind the photographer. things get complicated with backlight, creating ghosting and glare as seen above. the light bounces between the glass elements (and the dark filter used to photograph the sun is also glass, complicating it further). taking a direct photo of a light (especially the fucking SUN) leads to some pretty crazy unpredictable variables.
My camera has recently taken on a new malady too, where at low speeds, the shutter (which in this camera is a huge metal curtain sticks at the edge without totally closing. It causes these stripes at the edge of the picture. This can be frustrating if i forget, but I like having the issue. If i want a picture to look normal, to plan it out, to totally control it, I have a digital camera for that. I got into this film stuff for the eccentricities.
For the regular sun photos, I think I was shooting on Ilford FP4, which i think i stand developed in rodinal. At the eclipse, I only got through one roll of film, becasue the cloud cover was brutal, but i took those pictures on Kodak Tri-x 400 (developed normally in D-76). I did it all in Black and white because, in general, b&w negatives are pretty generous with mistakes. All the guides i could fine for solar photography were understandably written with digital cameras in mind, so I couldn't be totally sure about my math (as the camera is totally manual) or even my eye safety (as I'm using a viewfinder; my vision seems fine a month later)
the actual iris on this lens is right up in front. Tightening the aperture, especially when the extender is attached, leads to a vignetting issue, turning your pictures into a circle
once totality hits, the light changes dramatically. you can stare straght at it without glasses and not have to worry about damaging your eyes for those short minutes. so i didn't even bother with film at that stage. I just pulled out my DSLR with a cheap 500mm Samyang mirror lens made for pentax. It's very compact and very, VERY shitty. Shallow focus, really dark, ugly out-of-focus elements, focuses past inifinity, i love it. only got a couple pictures that way, and then put the camera down and enjoyed the experience
