How I shoot the moon..

[~AJ~]

Originally Posted by mermaid

Yeah I saw them.. but they still look better than the ones I took. I have a Nikon but I guess "IS" stands for "image stabilization" in the Canon language? Just like VR is "vibration resistance" in the Nikon language? Is that right? My kit came with a 200mm with no VR but with my first shots of the moon, I realized that my mistake was to use the auto focus and with the moon being so far away, I ended up with a fuzzy one even with my tripod. But for the shots that you see here, they're taken with the same no VR lens on a tripod but with manual focus. I'm pretty sure that even with your no IS lens, you will be able to take pretty crisp pics of the moon if you use the manual focus and a tripod. And besides, it's a 300mm that you have.. mine is 200mm It will certainly turn out much better! Now all of this is based on me assuming that 'IS' stands for 'image stabilization'.. heheh..

LOL - yep, IS is Image Stablising hehe.... Well, I guess I'll just have to wait for another good night to shoot the full moon & try it with the tripod and use MF instead.... Thanks for the tip!

[JKGraziano]

This is great, thank you for sharing... I'll have to try this out next time I shoot the moon.

[mermaid]

Originally Posted by ~aj~

lol - yep, is is image stablising hehe.... Well, i guess i'll just have to wait for another good night to shoot the full moon & try it with the tripod and use mf instead.... Thanks for the tip!

Good Luck!

[jackster12]

Hey there... I've really enjoyed being on this "moon" thread and have learned a lot. I spend a lot of this time of year in Europe, which happens to coincide with a lot of cloudy nights... and this year, some bitter cold... but I can't wait to get out there and take a few more moon shots with what I've learned.

That said, I did get some good ones on New Year's Eve. I posted them elsewhere in this thread. Since then, I've learned a few more things. And some, I think, might be interesting to what you guys are talking about in the last few posts here.

One is that... you want to take your moon photos with the IS turned off.

Reason: You'll be shooting it from a tripod. Tripod shots don't need IS and the IS can even get confused by the tripod setup (unless your camera has a feature to detect that it's on a tripod, in which case it turns off the IS for you).

The other thing that makes the moon shot elusive -- or did for me -- is that it seems so natural, given that it's a shot at night and on a tripod, to use a slow shutter speed. Instead, you want a relatively fast one -- around 1/250 or so.

Reason: The moon is moving. And it's also a very bright point in a very dark sky. With the shutter open too long, that's why you'll get the very white blur instead of crater detail.

Last three: You want to have your focal length as long as your lens will extend. It looks like here that 200mm is about the minimum and that 300mm and higher can produce some really nice shots. And combined with that you want your f-stop very small... which of course, is to say, a high number... f11 at least... but f16 seems common to a lot of the really nice shots. Plus, a low ISO so you can get the detail -- again something that might be counterintuitive to such a dimly lit shot.

So...
Fast exposure, not slow (1/250 or faster)
Tripod with no IS
Fullest focal length available (at least 200m)
Very small f-stop (f16 or so)
Low ISO (100-200)

Does that seem right to the seasoned moon shooters out there? I'm trying to pull from what I've seen in the posts with (in my opinion) the very best looking moon shots.

What you'll get, when you've done it right, is still a lot of pitch black sky with a very small moon in the actual shot... but a very pleasing result when you pop into photo processing software like Photoshop or Lightroom or Aperture for zooming in and cropping.

[joodiespost]

wow, great shot of the moon. My question is how did you get the image to be so big? I have a 300 mm lens and even cropped at 100% it's less then half that size. Did you use a teleconverter or enlarge the image?

Thanks

EDIT: Nevermind, I clicked on the 600mm + 2X Teleconverter shot, lol

[mshettysubbaiah]

Thanks for the tips again. I did try to capture a full moon in the past and I believe I was able to get a good shot. Here is the picture


I have provided details on how I got this shot and the post processing at my blog at Photography-Hobby-Fun. Please do visit. Thanks

[Ianzar]

Wow, so many nice shots of the moon. I should have gotten here earlier...

Well, I have a Nikon Coolpix P90, and the good things about shooting the moon with it are the zoom range (26-626mm) and the vibration reduction system (I haven't got a tripod yet).

The bad things are the noise and the variation of color you get on the border of the moon...

OK, it's not a pro, only a bridge camera, but I wish it had a larger sensor; maybe I'd get rid of those problems...

I used minor adjustments with Corel Photopaint (contrast mainly) and all the noise reduction I could lay my hands on!!!

[Ianzar]

Last week the moon hung up in the sky for most of the morning. I'm not exactly an early-morning guy, but I was happy to get these shots...

[tott7000]

Wow! Thanks for the tips, I'm so going to try this now.

[Isshe]

You did yourself Proud!!! WoW!!!