"Shoot for the moon and if you miss you'll be among the stars" - Les Brown
"Poetic, the stuff of romance and mystery. A bugger to capture on picture" - Learningtosnap
During the
night shooting trip a few weeks back, one of the things I tried and failed to
do was to include the moon in a picture. Now, you’d
think a big, reasonably static lump of “space stuff” wouldn’t be that hard to
picture, but damned if I could get it.
I tried
again last night.
I still
couldn’t get it.
In despair I used google and found an interesting
web site talking about how to shoot the
moon. Seems I’d been making a few simple mistakes.
- Autofocus doesn’t. Because the moon
is bright and the sky is dark the camera will over compensate and you’ll
get that shiny nonsense.
- Actually trying to zoom in on
the moon using a lens is much better than trying to pull the detail out
with crops later
Sounds
simple doesn’t it?
Well, I
went outside and tried again. The results this time were much better.
The first
shot is of an un-cropped, un-tampered moon and the second is post manipulation
to tweak the crop and the colour thresholds etc.
(1/100,
f/16, manual, focal length - 200mm, ISO - 100, 25/11/07 23:50)
(1/100,
f/16, manual, focal length - 200mm, ISO - 100, 25/11/07 23:50)
There are
still a few issues with this, mostly because I couldn’t get the tripod to the
angle I needed for the shot and so wasn’t stable as I would
have liked. The image is also a little on the soft side I think (which might be down to the lens being at its outer end). I’ll try this
again in weeks to come.
Anyone else
tried this or have suggestions?