‘None of them had ever seen an eclipse in real life’: Maurice Bakley’s best phone picture

An ​e​lementary school ​w​atch party turned into a great opportunity to take a child’s-eye view of a spectacular astral phenomenon

Maurice Bakley was chaperoning an eclipse watch party at his son’s elementary school in Arlington, Virginia, when he took this photograph. As he had arrived early to fit his iPhone to a tripod to capture a time-lapse of the event (with the help of a monocular and a solar filter), he reached for his iPad for this shot.

“The boys in the photo, one of whom is my son, are part of a tight group of friends. They’ve known each other since kindergarten through their bilingual Spanish immersion school,” Bakley says. “They were eight and nine years old at the time, and none of them had ever seen an eclipse in real life.”

As the kids were sitting cross-legged on the ground, Bakley made sure to get down to their level for this shot. “A top-down angle wouldn’t have conveyed the same intimacy,” he says. “I approach mobile photography in the same way that I used to approach SLR photography, which includes being intentional in both the capture and the edit.”

When editing, Bakley applied a film-like colour grading, and a touch of blur to the background to focus attention on the boys. He also opted for a square crop. “I don’t crop in that way often,” he says, “but it suited this composition, lending a more timeless, nostalgic feeling.”