Watch Where You Shoot

Out of the Sun

So, there I was panning my camera as an F-16 made a pass by the viewing area. My camera was happily clicking away when all of the sudden there is a bright flash and the entire world turns to white. Well, it turned white for my eye that was at the viewfinder. The other one was fine. What happened? While panning with the fighter jet, the plane crossed in front of the Sun. To make it a bit worse I had my telephoto lens zoomed all the way out to 300mm. Luckily the shutter blocked the sun and I was able to blink quickly enough to not cause any damage. My eye just watered for a couple of seconds.

However, imagine my reaction when I looked down at my camera's LCD display and saw the Highlight warning blinking on and off revealing the sharp crisp shadow of the F-16 as it emerged out of the sun's disc. Straight of the camera the photograph was this:

Into the Sun!

However, because of the highlight warnings (i.e. the "blinkies" screen) I knew that I might actually have an interesting abstract image. A little processing in Lightroom 2 and I was able to massage the picture up top out of the overblown pixels. I think that shooting Raw files instead of JPEGs might have helped as well since the file recorded more information.

I do not recommend photographing directly in to the sun. However, don't automatically delete what might at first seem to be a "bad" image. There might be a gem hiding amongst those pixels

Keep shooting.