Shooting the moon

is not as hard as it might seem.

Admittedly, it is a lot smaller than what we've shown you in our pictures. 
This is what it really looks like with a 300 mm lens.

Pretty small. But if you have a 12 or 18 megapixel camera, 
you can crop it to look as big as we've shown you.

You might also notice that it is too bright; can't see it's mountains and valleys. We'll work on that.

How about exposure?
Unlike pics of stars, the full moon is large enough so you can place your focusing spot on the moon and use auto focus 
(as long as you use a tripod to keep the moon in the focusing spot of your lens).

In fact, you can even set it to full automatic and let the camera do it all. 
But, it is better for you to select a high ISO speed so the exposure won't show motion.

Here is a fully automatic shot at ISO 1600 (after cropping to make it look big). 
The diaphragm was wide at f5.6 and the time was really short, at 1/4,000 of a second. So you you could have taken it without a tripod.
The original pic looked like a white ball in the sky. So, in order to see the mountains and valleys, we told the camera to under-expose it by a factor of 2.0 to 3.0 using the "exposure compensation" button. We even got some good ones at - 4.0.

Looks good, but a little grainy.

So, you can lower the ISO and shoot it on auto again, with negative exposure compensation to get the same brightness but with less noise.


There is another way of taking it….completely manually, and it is simple. But be sure to use a tripod.

Since the moon is reflecting so much of the sun's light, you can use of rule of f16. 
On a really bright day, you can shoot pictures at a small diaphragm opening of f16, if you set the  the shutter speed to the inverse of your chosen ISO. 
Say, you use ISO 100. Set the shutter speed to 1/125, and fire away at f16; most pics will look just fine on a real sunny day here on earth. 
(That's the way we did it back in the dark ages of film cameras without light meters.)
If it turns out too dark, just open up the diaphragm by lowering the f-stop one or two clicks.

The moon is real far away, so we'd expect to loose some brightness from there to here.
So, here is a manual shot at f11, 1/125 of a second, and ISO 100.

(Please, ignore the halo around the surface of the moon. 
That is an artifact created by the download to Blogspot; it is not on our real pictures)

It has a little less noise or mottle than the one shot at ISO 1600.

And shooting it manual makes one feel proud. "I took that picture", I say to myself, "not the auto functions on the camera".

And….Just think what you can do when it is closer to Halloween!

We bet you can use your imagination.
Maybe put something like this into a Photoshop-like add-on program and drop in a few bats to make it real scary.

Hopefully you'll pick up shooting in the dark as a new hobby. 
It's a lot of fun.