How a Nat Geo Photographer Captured the Total Solar Eclipse

Most photographers look up during an eclipse. Reuben Wu is just as interested in what happens to the land below.

Eclipse photography often centers on tight views of the sun and its corona. Wu takes a different approach: using a wide landscape to capture the strange, almost unearthly light of totality—and the moon’s shadow as it moves across the terrain.

For the August 12 total solar eclipse, the photographer and artist headed to Spain with an ambitious plan to combine that fleeting light with his signature approach to illuminating landscapes. We spoke with Wu about the scouting, technical preparation, and creative decisions behind photographing an event that lasted less than two minutes—and why this time, he wanted to make sure he actually looked up.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is not the first total solar eclipse you've photographed. What's your artistic relationship with eclipses?

I love photographing eclipses and have been doing so since 2017. That was the Great American Eclipse, and I shot that in Wyoming. Since that moment, I decided I was going to continue doing this because the light is so strange under complete totality. It seemed like a 360-degree sunset, where the light appeared to come in from all around me. It felt like nothing I'd ever felt before.

The next one I shot was in 2019 in Chile, and that one was interesting because the sun was at quite a low angle, just over the horizon. It took me two years to figure out where I was going to shoot it: on top of a mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean, because I wanted to be above any potential inversion of the clouds. Rather than photographing a close-up of totality, I decided to photograph what the landscape looked like under that unearthly light. I produced a very wide-angle view of totality, and what came out of that was a time-lapse where I captured the movement of the moon's shadow sweeping across the landscape and the ocean.

What did you find compelling about the 2026 total solar eclipse?

In Spain, the eclipse was happening around 8:30 p.m. local, and then sunset was about 40 minutes later. The sun was going to be really, really low, only about seven degrees above the horizon. My concept was to treat the solar eclipse as this unique lighting effect over the terrain and, like I did in Chile, to capture the moon shadow sweeping across the landscape. But in this case, the sun was going to be much lower.

I was really, really interested in how the sky was going to look, in the transition of light, the gradations, what we would see underneath the moon's shadow, if we would see any stars, any planets. And by coincidence, the Perseid meteor shower was actually peaking that night, and I thought that would be a really interesting facet of the work.

What images did you plan to capture during the eclipse?

The first was the time-lapse camera, which would capture the actual path of the moon shadow going across the landscape. I also had a telephoto camera to get close-up shots of the eclipse itself. I had a secondary camera where I was hoping to get a telephoto image with me and my friends in front of the eclipse, so that would be interesting. And lastly, I had a 360 camera, which would be stationed next to the time-lapse camera, so I could record what it actually felt like viewing the eclipse.

Your body of work challenges our perception of familiar landscapes and places by illuminating them at night with artificial light, often flown by drones. How did you hope to accomplish that here?

When you're photographing an eclipse, it's a documentary event, and you're using the camera to show what everything looks like around you. My visual language, where I'm using artificial light to augment natural landscapes at night, is how I own an image, what my authorship looks like.

With this eclipse, I wanted to combine my own visual language with the eclipse so that the image not only looked like an eclipse, but also looked like one of my images. I wanted to light the foreground in front of me because usually this would be in shadow, so I was looking for interesting foreground elements.

How did you plan this work, from scouting the location to composing an image when part of your subject wasn't yet there?

Figuring out where the line of totality happens on the planet is not difficult. There are so many apps that show that path. The only difference along that line is the height of the sun. My first bit of research was to figure out if I was going to be viewing it from Iceland, where the eclipse would be very high in the sky, or Spain, where the eclipse would be lower in the sky.

Once I figured out those two options, I took a look at weather conditions. I love Iceland, and it has incredible landscapes, but it's also prone to a lot of weather. I thought there was more likelihood of getting clouded out in Iceland than in Spain.

In Spain, totality crossed from the top of northern Spain to just south of Barcelona, and then across toward the Balearics. I was thinking it'd be interesting to go to Mallorca, where the sun would be literally at the horizon while it was in totality. But any slight cloud or haze on the horizon could really mess up the shot. I was going through visibility reports and cloud cover reports over the past years, and I thought that the risk was a little too much. So I thought that somewhere in northern Spain might allow me to get clearer skies, but at the same time have a very low angle of sun.

At that point, I had a few options north of Madrid. I hadn't been over there to scout properly yet. I'd just been remote scouting using satellite imagery, Google Earth, and Google Maps. I'd picked out a few summit positions where I could be as high up as possible with a clear westerly angle.

My safe bet was a mountain called Picos de Urbión, which is just an hour away from the city of Soria. It's a hike up, and there's a really beautiful glacial lake, which would be in the foreground of the photograph, and a really interesting ridge, which kind of reaches across into the center of the picture. There were a few other really interesting places with limestone towers, which were a little bit more low-lying, so it really was a case of finding out if there was a position where I could get a really good angle of the sky to the west.

Another thing that had happened over the previous few months was the occurrence of wildfires in the Madrid area, and at the time there was quite a bit of smoke. It could actually make the eclipse image look incredible, but it could also reduce the chances of seeing it.

So there were a lot of different factors, but I was trying to figure out the most likely spots I could photograph the eclipse from, balancing that out with the most aesthetic, artistic points of view. As I started to scout locations in person, I would start distilling what worked for the moment. I definitely saw the next few days as a process where I would start to filter out the things that were not going to work and focus on the things that I knew would work.

What did your team look like for this project? How did you plan for them to help you photograph the eclipse?

Solar eclipses are wonderful because it's amazing who you share that moment with. It's very much something that I enjoy experiencing with others. I had a few friends who were going to meet me along the way, and they would all be helping me operate cameras. I wanted as many extra pairs of hands as I could get because I was thinking of setting up as many different angles and points of view for this eclipse as possible.

How did you handle the pressure of time when it came to the eclipse? Totality wasn't particularly long—just about two minutes. Did you think you'd have any time to just enjoy the eclipse for yourself?

That's why I was allowing for a few days to location scout and do technical run-throughs so that we would be completely prepared for the two minutes. I wanted to do as much pre-production as possible, so that in the moment I could actually enjoy it and view it with my own eyes. In the past, I've been stuck to a camera, watching it through a lens, and I realized that I missed out on actually seeing what it looked like. So the idea was to get everything set up automatically to a point where, when the eclipse happened, we could actually view it and enjoy it rather than stress out about cameras.

Are you already planning for the 2027 eclipse, given its six minutes of totality?

Honestly, I've not thought that far in the future, but six minutes does sound very tempting. It passes through Egypt, and I've never been to Egypt before, so that might be really interesting.