Capturing the sun’s corona during totality is a difficult challenge. The area of the corona near the edge of the surface of the sun is much brighter than its outer edge. Any single exposure will either expose the bright areas correctly while the dimmer areas are completely under exposed, or blow out the inner bright corona and correctly expose the outer edge.
At shorter exposures only a small fraction of the corona is visible, but the solar prominences are clearly visible around the edge of the black disk of the moon.
At an exposure of 1/2 of a second the solar prominences and the inner area of the corona are completely ever exposed and blown out, but the outer edge off the corona are now visible.
In order to see all of the corona in one image we need to combine many images taken at different exposures to produce an HDR image. Normally photo editors like Lightroom or Photoshop make this incredibly simple, but the HDR functions are tuned for every day situations not rare eclipses, so we need to do the entire process manually.
I imported 9 images (each taken 1 stop apart) into Photoshop, manually aligned them, then combined them into a Smart Object. Afterwards I used a layer mask with the dark moon of the image taken at 1/320 of a second to show off the prominences. Then I fiddled with many setting until I got an image I was happy with.
But I still felt I could make a better (or at least different image). I wanted to show more of the texture in the corona.
This texture is not very visible with the naked eye during the eclipse, but is captured by the camera.
This textured image is my favourite eclipse image I have ever created (so far).
There are still more different images I could create with the exposures I took during totality, but for now at least I am satisfied with the images I created.