Shooting the Moon

PhotoDavid78

Lately I have been wanting to take more shots of the moon. Below is my most recent one. I use a Pentax k10D with a tamron 300mm lens, a tripod, and cable release. I'm having a lot of trouble getting a crisp focus of the moon itself. I used Unsharp Mask in photoshop 7 to sharpen this shot up a bit. Any hints or tips?

xris

Nice Shot!

dtw78 wrote:

Lately I have been wanting to take more shots of the moon. Below is my most recent one. I use a Pentax k10D with a tamron 300mm lens, a tripod, and cable release. I'm having a lot of trouble getting a crisp focus of the moon itself. I used Unsharp Mask in photoshop 7 to sharpen this shot up a bit. Any hints or tips?

Wow. Nice work!

But hey! That's the same Moon we have here!!!

1/ The atmosphere always gets in the way. Warm your batteries and shoot in the coldest, clearest night possible. From as high an altitude as possible.

2/ Use a haze filter at least. I'm told a deep red filter and a fast lens gives great results too.

Now if you could get a shot of the other side it would make great stock!:D

PhotoDavid78

moon

xris wrote:

Wow. Nice work!

But hey! That's the same Moon we have here!!!

1/ The atmosphere always gets in the way. Warm your batteries and shoot in the coldest, clearest night possible. From as high an altitude as possible.

2/ Use a haze filter at least. I'm told a deep red filter and a fast lens gives great results too.

Now if you could get a shot of the other side it would make great stock!:D

thanks for the tips. That would be quite a shot wouldn't it.

DJ-S1

David, that a good shot but it's oversharpened IMO. It's hard to tell at this size but the glowing white edges top and bottom are usually a telltale sign. I would back off the USM a bit - I don't feel that moon shots don't need to be super crisp.

You should definitely try to get some shots of the upcoming lunar eclipse too!

PhotoDavid78

DJ-S1 wrote:

David, that a good shot but it's oversharpened IMO. It's hard to tell at this size but the glowing white edges top and bottom are usually a telltale sign. I would back off the USM a bit - I don't feel that moon shots don't need to be super crisp.

You should definitely try to get some shots of the upcoming lunar eclipse too!

you should have seen the blurry image before the USM

Richard

dtw78 wrote:

you should have seen the blurry image before the USM

One trick I have learned is to mask out the sharpening around the circumference, where it is most visibly wrong. You don't need to be very precise about it...just use a small brush on a quick mask and cover the edge where the white meets the black.

kdog

Your latest moon shot is August, 2007?

Anyway, it's posted way too small to see what's going on there. Sounds like you're on the right track with the tripod. Exposure is tricky, because the sky is black, and the moon is essentially daylight. Spot expose directly on the moon if you can. Watch your overexposure indicator to make sure you're not blowing it out.

And sorry, but never use any kind of filter when shooting the moon. Also, shooting the full moon is the most difficult shot because there's very little contrast. Shooting on the half-moon is the best.

Here's a link to one of my shots taken with a Canon 100-400 zoom.
http://www.jacara.com/cpg144/albums/az_landscape/IMG_6534.jpg

Here's the exposure info for that shot.
Exposure Time: 1/160 sec
FNumber: f 6.3
Focal length: 400 mm
ISO: 200
Model: Canon EOS 20D

Cheers,
-joel

DJ-S1

dtw78 wrote:

you should have seen the blurry image before the USM

Does your camera have mirror lockup (MLU)? Could help a bit with shake, if any was present.

I know it took me many tries to get a shot I was reasonably happy with. Keep shooting!

pathfinder

David, Welcome to dgrin,

Shooting the moon has been extensively discussed here on dgrin and elsewhere. A quick search on dgrin "shooting the moon" yields this page - http://www.dgrin.com/search.php?searchid=878668

The moon is a sunlit object and thus is very bright in the night darkened sky. One way of estimating the exposure for the moon is the Sunny 16 Rule which I wrote about here

Camera light meters do a very poor job of estimating exposure for moon shots, unless you have a very long lens that fills the frame with the moon image almost entirely.