Point your camera onto the sun and you risk permanent damage of your sensor. But how to take photos of clouds with the sun in the middle? The answer is ND filters or welding glas. That last one is the cheapest solution.
The different lenses in your objective do work like a magnifier on a white piece of paper: it intensifies the light to the centre. The paper burns away – the sensor, too.
Originally I wanted to do a timelapse of the sun eclipse in march 2015 in Nijmegen. But I forgot about the sun eclipse and the Astro Foil was everywhere sold out. So I wanted to use one of those eclipse glasses, but there were as well sold out. The local photography shop weren’t even aware of that there was a sun eclipse ahead (!), but surprisingly they went out of the stronger ND-Filters. You can use ND-filters to reduce the bright lights, but you need strong ones. Via some friends I heard that welding glass could work aswell.
I went to the local building supplies store to look there for some welding glass. And I found for 10€ simple welding glasses. Simply like sunglasses for your face, but then with that typical green glass! It was no problem to take out the glasses. I took a yoghurt cup with the diameter of my lens, cut a hole in it and put the welding glass on it.
The black isolation tape is needed to prevent that the bright light would come through the sides
All pictures through that welding glass are absolutly green. With the white balace correction you can get 80-90% rid of it, but some green will stay! You need to edit those pictures afterwards in Lightroom. It will take some time until you get your blue sky back, but as you can see in the example: the blue doesn’t look natural, but its the best you can do.
Here below is an example.
This worked for me, I cannot give an guarantee if it works for you, too! Use it on your own risk!