iPhone, iPad and an Eclipse: How Maurice Bakley Shot His Best Phone Picture

Maurice Bakley photographed a group of eight- and nine-year-old boys watching their first real-life solar eclipse — and he took the shot on an iPad, not his iPhone, at an elementary school in Arlington, Virginia.

The occasion was an eclipse watch party at his son's school, where Bakley was acting as a chaperone. He had arrived early to set up his iPhone on a tripod for a time-lapse of the event, rigging it with a monocular (a single-eye magnifying scope) and a solar filter to protect both the optics and the sensor. With the phone committed to that job, he reached for his iPad to make this picture.

"The boys in the photo, one of whom is my son, are part of a tight group of friends," Bakley says. "They've known each other since kindergarten through their bilingual Spanish immersion school."

"They were eight and nine years old at the time, and none of them had ever seen an eclipse in real life," he says.

Why did he get down on the ground?

The children were sitting cross-legged to watch the sky, so Bakley lowered himself to their eye level before pressing the shutter. That decision shaped the entire image.

"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."

An SLR (single-lens reflex) is a conventional interchangeable-lens camera. The comparison is Bakley's shorthand for a working method: the device changes, the deliberate habits don't. Composition first, then an equally deliberate edit.

What happened in the edit?

Bakley's post-processing had three distinct moves:

• A film-like colour grading, which gives the image the muted, analog palette associated with older film stock
• A touch of background blur, drawing the eye to the boys rather than their surroundings
• A square crop, an uncommon choice for him that he made deliberately for this frame

"I don't crop in that way often," he says. "But it suited this composition, lending a more timeless, nostalgic feeling."

That reasoning matters for anyone shooting on a phone. The square format flattens the hierarchy of the frame — no dominant horizontal sweep of sky or ground — and here it keeps four small faces and their shared reaction as the whole story.

What does this change for phone photographers?

The practical takeaway from Bakley's process is that gear flexibility beats gear purity. His main device was tied up in one creative task, so he used a secondary one and still produced a winning image. The picture's strength comes from posture and patience — matching the subjects' eyeline — plus restrained editing that serves the moment rather than decorating it.

Bakley's photograph shows what a chaperone with a tablet can achieve when the first-timers' eclipse is treated as a portrait session, not just a sky event.