To those iconic images we added another this week, the shot by Dave Petkiewicz of the eclipse framed by Terminal Tower. Lots of us have photos of the eclipse. Dave got the shot that says, “Cleveland.” That was not so simple to do as you might think. Dave started considering it seven years ago, when he traveled south to get a photo of the total eclipse of 2017. He knew Cleveland would be in the path of totality this year and began imagining then where he could get an eclipse picture that was unmistakably in Cleveland. I talk with Dave about photography whenever I can because I like taking pictures. Talking to him is like getting free coaching sessions. I remember how exhilarated he was upon returning from the 2017 eclipse, talking about how that experience would help him take even better shots in 2024. The challenge of framing a celestial event with a terrestrial landmark is the height. You need something tall enough to fit into a photo of something that is almost a quarter of a million miles away. Plus, the photographer has to have some distance from the landmark to successfully use the zoom lens to bring everything together. Dave looked everywhere. He thought about the Garfield Monument. He rolled through other tall buildings. None of them says Cleveland like Terminal Tower. Once he identified Terminal Tower as his target, he had to find the right spot to shoot from, where the Sun (and moon) would be close enough to the building to get both in his viewfinder. That meant going downtown and wandering around at midday on multiple days. The ideal spot, as he wrote in a piece describing his effort, was across the street from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. He arrived at 10 a.m., set up, and the rest is photographic history. We lucked out with the weather in Northeast Ohio, so we had nearly four spectacular minutes of totality, when we were surrounded by darkness while looking at what appeared to be a hole in the sky. We all now know that partial eclipses simply do not compare to total eclipses, and none of us is likely to forget the magic of Monday afternoon. After Dave’s photo was published, we started hearing from people who wanted high-resolution copies. Normally, we charge people $75 for private use of a photo. Brad Harmon, the president and publisher here, decided to help people remember this moment more affordably. He cut the price of Dave’s photo to $20. We provide a digital file that people can take to any copy shop for a quality print. We also gathered seven other images of the day that people might want. I’ve attached them here. Josh Gunter and John Kuntz took the other pictures. I put together a sequence I shot of the multiple phases of the eclipse. This column is not a sales tool. I’m not trying to sell you pictures. Providing the images at $20 probably costs us money because we don’t have a mechanism for this, so we handle the sales manually, one at a time, in between other duties. I bring this up only if you’d like a quality picture to remember our communal, once-in-a-lifetime moment. If you’re interested, send me an email, and I’ll forward it to the right place. And if you liked Dave’s photo, think about sending him a note. He’s at dpetkiewicz@cleveland.com I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com Thanks for reading | 