Shooting the moon (and the sun): How Bo Bridges captured totality

During the April 8 solar eclipse, Bo Bridges captured the "Diamond Ring," which occurs moments before and after "totality." Bridges wasn't planning to photograph the eclipse but by happenstance found himself in Texas, with only a long lens. Photo by Bo Bridges

by Mark McDermott

 

The April 8 eclipse of the sun by the moon was not on Bo Bridges radar.

Bridges was planning to visit his oldest son, who is going to college at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, for the school’s annual dads’ weekend. He was also going to bring his second oldest son. He figured as long as he was going to be in the area, he and his sons could also visit the Waco Surf ranch, which has a wave pool that rivals the famous Kelly Slater wave pool. Bridges, a Manhattan Beach resident who is one of the go-to action sports photographers in the world, is well connected in the surf world. He happened to know one of the guys who owns the surf park, Mike Schwab, so three weeks before his trip, he called to see if he could book some time on the wave. No problem, his buddy said. A nice weekend getaway and some quality time with his son was falling into place.

Then, towards the end of March, Bridges went online to book a flight, and something odd kept happening.

“It was like $1,000 one way for economy,” Bridges recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, it must be a glitch in the system. I don’t know what that’s all about. I’ll try again later.’”

Bridges tried again a little later, and the same results popped up, a $1,000 for a flight that usually costs a few hundred. He was perplexed and mentioned the oddity to a friend.

“Dude,” his friend said. “You better buy that ticket. There’s not going to be any left.”

“Why?” Bridges asked.

The reason, of course, was the solar eclipse that was occurring the Monday after the weekend Bridges intended to go. The eclipse would only be about 50 percent in Southern California, but would achieve totality in Texas. People were flying in from all over the world to see it.

“I did not realize it was this massive eclipse,” he said.

Bridges booked the flight. Then he tried to rent a car. Every car was booked at Dallas-Fort Worth. He even tried Austin, an hour away. No rentals were available.

“I just went without a car and Uber-ed,” Bridges said. “So I got there and hung out, but I was paying for the most expensive solar eclipse prices possible. And I wasn’t even going to shoot the eclipse, because I had a shoot on Monday in Malibu with another production. I was already locked and loaded and it was like, ‘I can’t get out of this.’ I was going to fly back Sunday night and I was going to miss the entire eclipse. But, you know, it was dad’s weekend at my son’s college, I didn’t want to miss that, so I had to just suck it up and buy the ticket.”

Bo Bridges with his sons, Kai and Tosh.

He and his sons, Kai and Tosh, had a great weekend. They played pickleball, had some great dinners, and hung out with other sons and fathers. Bridges managed to book time for a couple of his son’s friends and their dads at the wave pool, and so Sunday morning they got up and headed to Waco, about 90 miles away. Then Bridges got a phone call. The photo shoot in Malibu on Monday was canceled.

“And that kind of opens up my Monday, so I could stay for the eclipse. I am already here,” Bridges said. “But the weather looked terrible, on paper. It looked like it was going to be overcast with thunderstorms – I mean, it was like an 80 percent chance of rain and thunderstorms at 1 p.m.”

Bridges was doing his calculations, looking at what it would cost to change his ticket, on top of what he’d already spent, trying to figure out if staying made any sense at all. He was on the fence. Then his friend, the owner of the wave pool, made the choice easy.

“If you want to stay, we have last minute cancellations,” Schwab told Bridges. “Because people are changing their minds, due to the weather, and going to different locations. I’ll hook you up and you can stay at the Waco surf ranch Sunday night, and you can surf a little bit, too.”

Well alright, then, Bridges said. Why not?

“I looked at the bright side of it – if it rains or it’s cloudy, I’ll miss the eclipse, but I get to just hang out and surf a little bit,” he said. “So I decided to go for it and stay put, hunker down and see what happens.”

Bridges and his son and their crew surfed Sunday and were duly blown away by the wave pool.

“It’s so perfect. It’s beyond,” he said. “Not only that, it goes for like a quarter of a mile, and it’s repetitive. It’s unreal. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

A couple professional surfers who Bridges knew, Dylan Graves and Cliff Kapono, also happened to be at Waco Surf.

Bo Bridges with pro surfers Cliff Kapono and Dylan Graves (and a member of their crew) at Waco Surf.

“They were there surfing which also made it kind of cool,” he said. “But they had also planned ahead. They knew that might have been the only place in the world you could surf during totality.”  

Late Sunday, Bridges scouted out the territory around the wave pool to find a good spot to shoot the eclipse the next day, though his hopes were not high. Graves, who was also making a short film, pulled up a meteorologic website Sunday night that showed total cloud cover the next day. Kopano, who is also a conservation scientist, calculated there was a 5 percent chance they’d see the eclipse.

Monday morning broke clear, and the skies stayed blue all through mid-morning. But just as forecasted, at about 11 a.m., clouds moved in, and everything turned gray.

“It started getting socked in with clouds and I was like, ‘Oh, here we go,’” Bridges said. “And of course, all the hype, now it’s all over the news – now, you really want it, because now at this point, you’re like, ‘Damn, I’m right here in the path of totality, and I’ve got cloud cover.’ Just like the weather had reported. Again, I was just trying to look at the bright side of it. My son is here, hanging out, having fun. But the clouds were not helping any.”

Even if the clouds miraculously parted, Bridges was not well-equipped to shoot the eclipse. Graves and his crew had a full array of gear, including a wide lens, long lens, filters, Go-Pros set for time lapse, and even a drone to film the surfers on the wave pool during the eclipse.

 “I brought nothing but a long lens, only because I thought I might shoot my son and his friends surfing,” he said. “I had no filters and no tripod, so the only time I could actually take a picture of the eclipse would have been during totality, because that’s the only time safe enough to look at the sun and point your camera at it. Because otherwise, it can burn your retina out, and it can also burn your entire sensor out of your camera.”

Bridges shot an eclipse in Oregon in 2017. That eclipse wasn’t even close to totality and it still wrecked his camera.

“It wasn’t in the path of totality. It was just like a corner, and you got this bright light,” he recalled. “I tried to use filters there and it burned my filters. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. It actually sizzle-fried my filters. That didn’t work, and it scared me pretty good.”

Bo Bridges shooting the eclipse.

Bridges made his way towards the spot he’d picked out to shoot, a little way from all the activity near the surf pool. As he was walking, he ran into somebody who was just there to surf.

“That’s a big lens,” the person said. “Oh, you are going to shoot the eclipse!”

“You know, I was hoping to, but there’s clouds everywhere,” Bridges said.

They both looked up, saw total cloud cover, and chuckled. Bridges got to his spot, sat, and waited.

“I was sitting there looking at it going, ‘Oh man,’” he said. “But I could see it was like those cumulonimbus clouds, like Simpsons-style clouds with some darker ones in the distance and around us. But it was a long strand of clouds and I thought maybe – maybe – there’s a chance it is going to open up.”  

The partial eclipse began at 12:20 p.m. In the wave pool, the surfers surfed in the growing dark. The drone footage in Grave’s film, which he titled “tOtAL sOLAR eCLIPSe” and later posted on YouTube, shows the surfers catching waves in the eerie twilight as the lights of the surrounding ranch go on. By the time totality arrived at 1:38 p.m., the skies were utterly clear.

“It started to get bluer and bluer to the point of totality,” Graves said in the film. “It was like, no clouds. I think there was maybe one cloud that moved over real quick and then it got blown away. And then we just experienced complete totality.”

“I’d just sat there and waited and it took about seven or eight minutes, but sure enough, the clouds just pushed on through and bam, it hit,” Bridges said. “I just started snapping pictures and getting chills. It was so cool. The whole thing just came together.”

The total eclipse, shot from Waco Surf in Texas. Photo by Bo Bridges

Totality lasted about four minutes. Bridges shot for a couple minutes, then stopped just to take it all in.

“I put my cameras down and just enjoyed it for a few minutes,” he said. “I just laid there. It was wild. The birds went silent and it went dark and got chilly.”

Then the sun peaked through again. Almost immediately, the clouds returned. In a short video he posted on Instagram that day, a clearly exhilarated Bridges is walking under totally overcast skies, enthusing about what he’d just experienced.

“That was so unreal. So sick,” a beaming Bridges says, looking into the camera. “Supposed to be cloudy all day. Cloud cover, completely right now. Took our chances, stuck it out. I can’t wait to download these pics.”


Bridges nailed it. Thousands of photos were shot that day, but few captured the eclipse with the almost mystical power that gleams from his photographs. All photography is about timing, but these shots have layers and layers of timing that made them possible. Bridges was an accidental eclipse photographer, and it could not have turned out better.

“I thought about exposures and stuff going into it…But I was like, ‘You know what, I am going to stop it down, I am going to shoot super-fast frame rates.’ Because I don’t want to damage my eyes or my sensors,” he said. “So I started at like f22, the tightest aperture, then went up. I think I did like 4,000th of a second. Then as it got completely covered up, I opened it up a little bit, so I could get a little more of those light rays coming off, wrapping around the moon.”

Few photographers have photographed more exciting subject matter than Bridges, from Olympic skiers and snowboarders to surfers and skateboarders, often in some of the most extreme and beautiful places in the world, high in the mountains and in the trough of the most epic waves. But Bridges felt that this experience in some ways was among the most outright thrilling.

“I mean, I’ve shot a lot of neat things,” he said. “But to see something so big and powerful get overlapped…It just doesn’t make much sense. At the same time, it happens in different places in the world throughout our lifetimes. But it doesn’t happen that often. And then, to have it all line up, the weather, and I just happened to have the right camera with me that could reach that distance, and a lens long enough. To think that you kind of went out on a limb, hoping to experience it, and it all came together. It was such a cool experience.“

Those who experience totality have trouble putting it into words. Kopano, the surfer-scientist, tried.

“I think why people get so responsive to it in ways they can’t describe is because both the sun and the moon have such a pull on us,” he said. “Everything in space is on this fabric, so every large object has a force, like a full energy. So to have them synchronized, that’s like energy that’s passing through us that we never typically feel, because it never aligns. They’re usually opposing a little bit, so one is going to cancel the other. So we’re just getting like full cosmic forces, right? It’s cosmically maximized.”

Or, as Bridges wrote in another Instagram post, “Nothing but surprises around every corner.”  

 

 

 

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.