Monday,April,26,2004

How to Shoot the Moon

A quick lesson on how to capture images of the moon

I know it’s not a full moon, and it’s not the best picture I’ve ever taken, but this image should be good for a lesson on how to shoot the moon…

For many people it’s very challenging to take a photograph of the Moon. Yet Luna, our closest celestial neighbor is a great subject. With just a little know how, you’ll soon be snapping lovely photos!

Here are the details of the photo that is posted with this article. I just captured this image this evening.

Camera:              D100 Digital Nikon SLR
Lens:                   Nikkor 500mm reflex (mirror) Fixed F8
Shutter Speed:     1/1250
Aperature:           F8
Exposure mode:    manual
CCD ISO Equiv:     1600
Tripod:                 None (handlheld)

The first thing to figure out when taking photos of the moon is how to set your exposure.

It seems very difficult until you consider that really what you are doing is capturing an image of something that is sitting in direct sunlight!

the easiest way to calculate exposure of an object in direct sunlight is to start with the basic “Sunny F16” rule.

This rule says that in direct sunlight, if you set the shutter speed to one over the ISO setting of your film (or CCD) and set your aperature to be F16 you will probably be pretty close to a good exposure.

Of course with a digital camera, it’s easy to verify what you are actually getting when you start shooting, so I was able to make adjustments to my exposure on “the fly”.

In my case, had a fixed F8 aperature on my mirror lens, so my only adjustments were shutter speed and ISO equivilent CCD sensitivity.

I wanted a fast shutter speed since I was hand holding the camera, hence I set it the sensitivity on the D100 to be 1600. I played around with the exposure and found that underexposing a bit with a final shuterspeed of 1/1250 yielded the best results.  The downside of cranking up the sensitivity so high is that there is a fair amount of noise in the system.

In Photoshop, I adjusted levels, cropped the image, and sharpened it a bit with unsharp mask, and then a “sharpen” from the sharpen menu. Sharpening really brought out the detail and texture on the surface of the moon.

If you are taking a photo of the moon, and you have terrestrial object in the foreground, and it’s night time (dark), you will have difficultly balancing the exposure between the bright moon and the countryside.

There are two basic approaches.