Around noon on Mar 30, 2024, I practiced taking pictures of the Sun using my Nikon Z6II and Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 Ai lens (serial 537255). I wanted to practice setting up for the eclipse.
I created a solar filter for this lens by fixing a piece of Thousand Oaks silver-black polymer filter material to a homemade cardboard "lens cap". The material was not taut, but rather wavy, so I expect that the quality of images taken through it will be mediocre. However, since my goal for this filter is simply to allow me to set up the camera on the day of the eclipse, point the telescope to the Sun, and place the Sun near the center of the field of view, that's fine. When totality begins, I'll remove this filter and take pictures of the stars around the eclipsed Sun.
Must remember to put filter or lens cap back on the lens before totality ends!
After some experimentation, I found that the following combinations yield filtered images of the Sun which are not saturated, but which have decent signal.
An example image with the latter settings is shown below. The Sun occupies only a small portion of the entire image:
If we zoom in to the Sun, we see that it spans about 350 pixels, at a scale of about 5.4 arcsec per pixel. There is no real detail visible. Again, for my purposes, that's fine.
To be fair, there weren't many details visible on the Sun this day, even for much better telescopes. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, for example, shows only one small sunspot group, very near the limb. Some of my images showed a hint of this sunspot.
