The story of Red Bull's high-flying eclipse photo is a testament to the meticulous planning and execution that goes into creating a once-in-a-lifetime image. Photographer Noah Wetzel and Red Bull Air Force athlete Mike Brewer spent nine months preparing to capture a wingsuit flight through a total solar eclipse. The final image was taken in Spain during just 84 seconds of totality, with Wetzel working from nearly a mile away and relying on a Canon EOS R5 II, a 600mm lens, remotely triggered flashes, and calculations that left almost no room for error. The photograph shows Brewer racing through the glowing ring of totality at roughly 150 miles per hour, his body frozen against the darkened sky. It looks like a moment that simply happened to align, but nearly every element had been engineered long before the eclipse appeared. Wetzel had to determine exactly where the eclipse would sit above the horizon, where the athletes would fly, how much room he needed in the frame, how to illuminate them from 1,400 meters away, and how to freeze their movement in near-total darkness. Even after months of preparation, he would ultimately have only a few hundredths of a second to make the photograph. The project began with an idea that had already been proven difficult once. Wetzel had photographed a mountain biker during the 2017 total solar eclipse, an image that went on to win a category in the Red Bull Illume photography competition. This time, he and Brewer wanted to take the concept much further. A wingsuit flyer would replace the mountain biker, and instead of photographing the athlete relatively close to the action, Wetzel would work from approximately 1,400 meters away. The athlete would also be traveling at around 150 miles per hour, while totality would last only 84 seconds. Wetzel and Brewer spent nine months working through the variables, including four test productions. One of those tests took place before sunrise in Moab, Utah, and required the team to cross a river by raft before carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment up a mountain in the dark. The actual location in Spain presented another set of uncertainties. Wetzel could calculate where he wanted the eclipse to appear and where the athletes needed to fly, but he could not know exactly what he would encounter until he arrived. Spanish Red Bull athlete Dani Román also helped Wetzel and Brewer understand the terrain and participated in the eclipse flight, allowing the team to test the flight path during the actual event. Wetzel originally expected to photograph the flight at either 840mm or 1200mm. A tighter composition would make the relationship between the athlete and the eclipse even more dramatic, but it would also dramatically increase the consequences of even a small positioning error. The final hero angle was shot with a Canon EOS R5 II and Canon RF 600mm f/4 lens. The longer focal lengths were still possible, but Wetzel realized that the 600mm would give him more breathing room precisely when he would be trying to track an athlete he could barely see. The lighting was designed around a fundamental problem: the athletes were moving too quickly for the camera’s shutter speed alone to freeze them cleanly. For the hero photograph, Wetzel used four wireless flashes, three Godox AD1200 Pros and one Godox AD360 II+ C. They were positioned along the horizon in the flight zone and arranged to overlap their illumination across the area where the athletes would pass. The flashes were set to 1/8 power. That setting was a compromise: Wetzel needed enough output to overpower the available eclipse light, but increasing the power would lengthen the flash duration, making it harder to freeze the athletes. The flash duration speed of the flashes is actually what’s freezing the movement of the athlete at 150mph, not the shutter speed. Therefore, I wanted to keep the flash duration speed no lower than 1/2500s (which is exactly 1/8th power). The athlete is moving at roughly 200 feet per second in complete darkness, therefore At 1/2500s flash duration speed, the motion blur of the athlete within the flash duration is only one inch of movement, which I figured relatively insignificant at 1,400 meters away. Wetzel settled on 1/200 second, ISO 2500, and f/4 for the hero camera. The shutter speed helped control ambient motion and camera shake while the flash handled the critical moment of movement. The team had invested approximately 600 hours and nine months in preparing for a window that would last just 84 seconds. The photograph ultimately succeeded because the individual pieces of an extraordinarily complicated system came together at exactly the right moment. The eclipse was in position, Brewer was on the correct flight path, the focus held, the flashes fired, and Wetzel pressed the shutter within a window measured in hundredths of a second. The result is an image that looks almost impossible precisely because, by Wetzel’s own description, it very nearly was.
