A marvelous night for a moondance… August 22, 2006
Posted by jessicraft in photography.trackback
After enjoying an earlier evening’s long-exposure goodness my friend and I returned to try shooting the moon. Usually when you shoot things in the evening you go about it in two ways – one, you might try using a high ISO, wide aperture, to get things moving quickly; two, you might get out the tripod and use slower ISOs and smaller aperture settings and long exposures.
I had tried to take shots of the moon before and because it’s night I started with the above in mind. However, what one easily forgets when shooting the moon, is how much light the moon gives off. It’s incredibly bright so you don’t need the super long exposures or the wide aperture.
After some experimentation I came at the following result – and while things looked fairly focused on my camera, the final result is far too blury for my liking. I think that’s part of the problem with my lens but it could also be poor focusing on my part. Anyhow, here is the result.
Need to keep trying, but I think I’m heading in the right direction..
The vibrations of the mirror slapping can throw the focus off when shooting the moon, so if your camera has mirror lockup, use it with a remote to prevent any kind of shake. Since the moon is reflected sunlight, the rule-of-thumb is to use the “Sunny-16 Rule”. For an object in direct sunlight expose at f/16 and time is 1/ISO. So for 100 ISO, your exposure would be about 1/125, which is a good starting point for moon exposure.
After the night out I did a little research and came across all kinds of sites talking about the “sunny-sixteen rule”
Haven’t had a chance to try it with that in mind yet, but definitely will be. Cheers 