Here are a few shots of the Venus transit from a few weeks ago. Being on the East coast, I had only ~3 hours of transit time before the sun would set. Unfortunately, a giant cloud bank blocked the initial part of the transit, but about 45 minutes prior to sunset, the clouds broke and I managed a couple of shots from the top of a nearby parking structure.
I had a pair of disposable glasses handed out by the SDO team that allowed direct viewing of the sun. I cut a small hole in a piece of cardboard, placed the filter in the hole, then taped the cardboard to 500 mm lens. Despite the amount of work that went into making the unwieldy contraption, the shot wasn’t very interesting (bottom right image). Venus is the circle at upper right. The other specks you seen on the solar disk are sunspots, which actually is pretty cool.
For the sunset, I took off the filter, stopped down to f/29 and shot at 1/8000 s, never looking through the eyepiece, but instead quickly rotating the camera until I could see sunlight poking out. Some birds were off in the distance flying across the horizon, and it made for a nice composition.
