The smoke, haze and ash from fires in Western Washington are obsuring the sun so much that near the end of the day, similar to the conditions a couple of weeks ago, the sun appears to be a disk in the sky, rendered in shades of orange. The same cautions apply to looking at the sun at any time of course. Don't...at least not without approved eclipse glasses and for cameras, neutral density filters that will protect the sensor. Doing so otherwise will seriously damage your retinas. 

But properly equipped, you can photograph the sun, during this period of polluted atmosphere and you will likely note the presence of sunspots. Spaceweatherlive.com is currently reporting that there are 28 sunspots on the sun at this time.

Kimberly Robinson captured some of the sunspot activity from Alki on Monday evening, Sept. 4 as the sun was setting. That meant the light was passing through the thickest part of the atmosphere, making it even darker. 

Clearly visible in her shot are Regions 2673 and 2674.

SpaceweatherLive.com posted about the Coronal Mass Ejection aimed at earth by Region 2673 and said,

"Eleven M-class solar flares thus far. Not bad for a sunspot region which only consisted of one single spot a few days ago. While most of these solar flares weren't eruptive, we are going to pick out two solar flares that resulted in a complex eruption yesterday (4 September) between about 18:30 UTC and 21:00 UTC. The show began with a very slow rising M1.7 solar flare (R1-minor) that was quickly followed by an M5.5 (R2-moderate) solar flare that peaked at 20:33 UTC. Check out yesterday's X-ray chart here for more details.

Two coronal mass ejections were flung into space in this time frame. First a slow eruption directed a bit to the south-west but this event was quickly followed by a much faster coronal mass ejection that left the Sun at about 1.500km/s and needless to say this second coronal mass ejection engulfed the first coronal mass ejection. This second coronal mass ejection was also much wider as it formed an asymmetrical full halo coronal mass ejection as we can clearly see on the SOHO/LASCO imagery below. If you look closely you can clearly see the two separate eruptions."

You can photograph the sun (whole disk) using a Neutral Density filter of at least 5.0, (OR HIGHER) ISO 100, at 1/3200 or for projection images ISO 400, 1/250 of second but check your exposure to vary it depending on atmospheric conditions and time of day. You may want to also add a yellow filter (number 8) since this can produce a more realistic color and increase contrast for sunspots, by reducing the amount of chromatic aberration.