Capturing more than an eclipse

Turning totality into art

Travelling to Spain for the 12 August 2026 eclipse, Angel Fux's priority was initially photography – to capture both remarkable closeups of the eclipse and a more ambitious composite that compresses the changing landscape and stages of the eclipse into a single artwork. But the project soon grew beyond the stills she had originally set out to take. With the skill and vision of filmmaker Prince Berkoh, she also co-created the short film The Shadow Between – Chasing Totality, which aimed not simply to record an astronomical event, but to communicate what it actually feels like to experience one. 

“I cried when I saw the footage,” reveals Angel. “The goal was to open a window for someone who has never experienced totality before and make them curious enough to want to experience it at least once in their lifetime.” Echoing her sentiment, Prince adds, “For me, the film is about what to expect when you’ve never seen an eclipse before and, if you have, helping you remember the emotions you felt when you experienced it.”

Small camera, serious codecs

Turning that ambition into something viewers could feel meant choosing the right tools for the job, and for Prince, who is based in Santander, northern Spain, that meant the Nikon ZR. “What impressed me most was how much power you get in such a tiny package,” he says. “It’s a really small camera, but having all those internal RAW codecs, including ProRes RAW and R3D NE, is incredible. It’s difficult to find something so portable that can still give you that level of quality, and I was really excited to work with those codecs. They gave us much more to work with in the edit, particularly when it came to colour grading. It was also really nice to have such a large display, with that huge, four-inch screen.”

Just as important as choosing the right movie-making camera was selecting the lenses that would bring the story to life. “Around 80% of the project was filmed with the NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S II, and that was an incredible lens,” explains Prince, who also made use of the NIKKOR Z 50mm f/1.2 S and NIKKOR Z 85mm f/1.8 S. "Personally, I love 24-70mm lenses for filmmaking because they’re so versatile for run-and-gun work. You can get detail-heavy scenes at 70mm, but 24mm is still wide enough for a lot of situations.

“What I really like about the 24-70mm f/2.8 S II is the internal zoom as the barrel doesn’t extend when you zoom. That’s incredibly useful when you’re working in tight spaces or using a gimbal, because you’re not changing the balance or putting extra stress on the motors. The image quality was also really nice. It’s very sharp, the autofocus worked really well for faster moving scenes and the wide aperture was particularly useful because we filmed a lot in low light. To be honest, sharpness isn’t always something I’m looking for in video, but for closeups and detail shots it was really useful. You can always soften footage later if it’s too sharp, but if it’s too blurry you can’t bring that detail back.”

Yet the lens that actually captured the eclipse itself was an unexpected, late addition, as Angel explains. “At the last minute, I asked my dad if I could borrow his NIKKOR Z 600mm f/6.3 VR S, and asked Prince whether he’d feel comfortable taking care of one of my set-ups to film it, as I would be concentrating on the photography. Originally, filming the eclipse was never part of the plan.”

The moment finally arrives

“Filming the eclipse itself wasn’t planned and, up until about 30 minutes before totality, I still didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it technically,” says Prince. “The light conditions changed so drastically and so quickly that I was thinking, ‘Do I shoot manual? Aperture priority? How am I going to manage the exposure?’ In the end, I decided not to overcomplicate it and just use aperture priority and let it run.”

Dialling in an aperture of f/11, Prince says he underexposed by one stop to protect the highlights, set an ISO limit so it couldn’t go too high and then let the camera handle the shutter speed and ISO. “That’s something I would never normally do when filming video,” he says. “But for this we didn’t need to follow the 180° shutter rule, and it worked incredibly well. The footage looked much better than I was expecting.”

Before capturing the eclipse in the mountains near Riaño in northern Spain, the pair had recorded interviews with Angel at an observatory in Switzerland in early June. The next stage of filming took place in Spain at the beginning of August, just before the eclipse, with most of the outdoor scenes recorded at Pico Gilbo in Riaño, alongside a few studio scenes. “There are so many different emotions leading up to an eclipse: the anxiety, the preparation, the expectation. I spoke to several eclipse experts and asked them all the same question, and everyone gave me a different answer about how it felt,” says Prince. “We wanted to capture all of those emotions on screen, and to reflect that we decided to use different kinds of movement. Sometimes handheld gave us more energy and grittiness, while the gimbal worked better for calmer, more subtle moments.”

Setting up the ZR

Beyond the eclipse footage, Prince kept his core settings relatively consistent, while making it easy to adapt quickly as conditions changed. “The ZR’s on-screen waveform helped a lot to make sure the exposure was right, and having quick access to things like frame rate, shutter speed, current recording format and codec, and ISO made a big difference,” he explains.

“We mainly filmed 4K at 25p because we’re in Europe and working in PAL but sometimes switched to 4K 50p. I mapped the frame rate to the custom menu so I could change between them quickly. I mainly used shutter angle at 180°, but we did switch to shutter speed for some timelapse scenes with slow shutter for convenience. When I worked with shutter speed rather than shutter angle, at 25p I used 1/50 sec, and at 50p I used 1/100 sec, and also 1/4 sec for slow shutter scenes at 25p.”

“For aperture, I like to film wide open most of the time, so we were mainly at f/2.8. The autofocus was really reliable, so that wasn’t an issue, and the wide aperture also helped because we filmed in low light quite a lot. We stopped down when we needed more depth of field or, for the eclipse, more sharpness.”

One experience, two interpretations 

While the film stretches the eclipse into a journey, Angel’s artwork almost does the opposite: it condenses the entire experience into a single frame, tracing the eclipse across a changing landscape from day to night. “The images of the eclipse I wanted to capture fell in two parts: the closeups of the eclipse, and then there was the final artwork, which was really the image I went there to create,” she says. “With the final artwork, I wanted to try something I hadn’t seen done in the same way before, especially with eclipse photography. Often you have a landscape, then a sequence of the eclipse added across the sky to show the progression over time. But I wanted that passage of time to affect not only the eclipse sequence, but the entire image, capturing the changing colour and light, and the transition from sunset into totality and then into night.

“Because it was a sunset eclipse, it became dark relatively quickly afterwards, and that made the capture very complicated. It was impossible to photograph everything at once. I couldn’t capture the landscape at the same time as using the NIKKOR Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S closeup set-up, so I had to separate the two. I photographed the landscape repeatedly from sunset into nighttime using the NIKKOR Z 14‑24mm f/2.8 S, and even the following morning, so I had enough material to reconstruct how the light was changing across the scene. And some days later, I focused entirely on capturing the eclipse itself. The wide-angle eclipse images also helped me analyse how the atmosphere and sky were evolving during the eclipse. So the final artwork is creative and interpretive, but it’s still grounded in what we actually observed and managed to capture.”

Describing it as "painstaking", Angel says creating the final artwork in post was the most complicated blending and stitching work she’d ever done. “I had to align multiple panoramas almost pixel by pixel and, even though I’d been very precise in the field, tiny differences became quite significant once I started combining everything. It was a lot of work, but I’m really happy with the result.”

More than a moment

Ultimately, both the finished artwork and the film set out to do something a single image could never achieve on its own: to preserve not just the eclipse itself, but the inexplicable, fleeting emotion of witnessing it. “As a filmmaker, you want people to feel something when they watch your work, and getting that emotion across has probably been the biggest challenge,” explains Prince. “What people will actually feel when they watch the film is something we can’t control. I just hope they feel something and, hopefully, are inspired.”

Prince’s top tips for making a short film…

1. Find a great subject and story
   “When it comes to documentaries, finding a good subject and a good story is so important. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your footage looks. If the story isn’t engaging, it’s not really going to fly.”
2. Pre-production is king
   “Pre-production is so underestimated. Everybody thinks about filming with the camera and getting cool shots, but if you don’t plan for the filming day it’s going to be chaos later.”
3. Keep an eye on Log exposure
   “Don’t rely entirely on what you see on screen. Even when using View Assist with log footage, I found the screen looked a little brighter than the footage actually was, so I’d overexpose a tiny bit. But you don’t need to eyeball it. The waveform will help you get the right exposure consistently.”
4. Pack a Micro HDMI cable
   “If you want to use an external monitor, don’t forget you need a Micro HDMI cable. But don’t worry if you don’t have one, as the ZR has a great big screen.”
5. Customise your controls
   “Map your main settings to the custom menu. It saves a ton of time and just makes everything smoother.”
6. Be solution driven
   “Work with likeminded people but also be someone who is easy to work with, openminded and willing to try new things. My first boss used to say, ‘The problem is not having a problem, the problem is not finding a solution.’ Being solution driven is super important.”
7. Look for creative inspiration
   “Don’t be afraid of looking at other people’s work and getting inspiration from it. There’s always going to be someone whose style or storytelling is where you want to get to, so finding inspiration in other creators is really important.”