I saw a bunch of photos of the moon on Flickr over the past few days, so I decided to give it a try. One of the issues with photographing the moon is that it is actually smaller than you might think. Well, I know its actually massive in size, but in relation to the rest of the sky, it takes up only a small fraction.
Because of its relative small size, it helps to have a really good zoom lens. The best zoom lens that I have is my Canon 70-200 2.8 USM IS. I also have a 1.4 extender, which effectively makes it a 90-280 lens. So all the way zoomed out, I could shoot at 280 mm. Even racked out (at maximum zoom), the moon only took up about five percent of the photo. The rest was night sky.
I first tried shooting it according to the camera's recommended exposure in aperture priority mode, and as I fully expected, it was over exposed. This is because the moon is so much brighter than the area around it. I might have been able to change the metering and shoot in AV mode, but instead I switched to manual mode and did a little trial and error.
After importing the photos to Lightroom, I touched them up a bit. The biggest thing I had to do was crop the photo so that the moon wasn't this small dot in the photo.
Oh, and did you know that Thai people don't talk about the man in the moon, rather the rabbit. If you look at it, the ears at the top left, the head bellow it, then the body, and the bottom right is the tail.
1 comment:
If I understood this correctly you can buy a bracket to hook up a camera to a telescope to get "close up" shots. Of coarse that would mean the added expense of buything the telescope but the shots I have seen using that technique were pretty amazing.
Dave
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