Choosing Trinity

Across the sky, the sun is gradually covered by the moon and then gradually reappears.

The moment of totality lines up with the cross atop the Church of the Most Holy Trinity below.

The image by Pittsburgh photographer Dustin McGrew is one of the many that has circulated on social media since Monday afternoon’s solar eclipse.

It begs a question.

Why here?

While the path of eclipse visibility was limited, it still stretched nearly 2,000 miles.

Why, and how, of all of the possible locations from southwest Texas to northwest New York, did a photographer from western Pennsylvania choose a church in northeast Jay County as the setting for his photo of an event that won’t happen again in the United States for 20 years?

“It was very random,” McGrew said.

Originally, the web designer who operates his photography business (dustinmcgrewphoto.com) on the side planned to head to Erie, Pennsylvania, about 125 miles north of Pittsburgh along the southern shore of Lake Erie.

The weather forecast nixed that idea. Cloudy skies were expected in northwest Pennsylvania.

“Two or three days out from the eclipse it looked like the best place was going to be Indiana or western Ohio,” said McGrew.

With that information in hand, he pulled up Google Maps.

He clicked on random locations — his searches stretched from Franklin (south of Indianapolis) to rural northwest Ohio south of Findlay — using the site’s street view feature to scope out his options.

McGrew spent hours Friday and Saturday on the process, looking specifically for an old barn or church. Knowing the sun was going to be high at the time of the eclipse, he wanted a tall subject to help fill out the sky.

“I came across the church and I basically marked that as the top of my priority list because that was the best place that I found,” he said.

Rather than making the 300-mile drive across Ohio on Monday morning, McGrew spent Sunday night in a hotel just north of Cincinnati. Still worried that someone else might get to his chosen location at 7321 Indiana 67 ahead of him, he woke up at 4 a.m. Monday to make the drive and stake his claim.

“I wanted to get there first and just kind of sit there,” said the 40-year-old father of two.

McGrew used PhotoPills, an app that shows where the sun and moon will be in the sky at specific times, to set up his series of photos such that the eclipse at the moment of totality would be in line with the steeple of the church. He had three cameras, including his Sony a7R III with a 12-24 millimeter lens on a tripod set up for the wide-angle shot of the church.

He set it up to take photos each minute through the process of the eclipse.

Utilizing Adobe Photoshop, he layered those images on top of each other.

“That creates that effect where you see each phase of the eclipse going across the sky,” McGrew said. “It turned out probably better than I could have ever imagined.”