Photographing the moon...

[rkoshy]

I'm trying to take some pictures of a moonlit scene... the problem is that the moon ALWAYS gets blown out.. -OR- the scene is too dark...

How does one capture the moon AND the scene?

I was able to capture some really "creepy" pictures by exposing for 30 seconds or so, where the scenery came to life, but the moon is completely shot..

[commando]

I'm new to this but here's what I think.

Having one very bright object and the rest of the picture is reasonably dark is a difficult shot. You're either going to end up with the moon blown out, or not enough light on the rest of the scene. I've read digital is worse than this than film.

You could exposure lock on either the moon or the rest of the picture, but that will cause problems.

My approach would be to use exposure bracketing, and combine the images in photoshop later. There's a good tutorial here (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml). Don't go overboard, people expect the moon to be bright compared with the surroundings.

[robertwgross]

It's a very tricky shot. I've seen some done (nicely) with the use of a graduated ND filter. Normally we think about that for a sunny sky, but it can be done with a moon-filled sky as well.

---Bob Gross---

[rkoshy]

Here's the shot I was trying to get... of course by the time I had tweaked all the settings ... it was quite a bit darker than when I started. It was really odd, because the moon was out, and the sunset was visible in a purplish/reddish color... (and it WAS NOT a full moon... it just got completely washed out).

Wonder how one can take a pic like this and make it NICE...

http://lists.softsys.com/~renny/moon/slides/IMG_5444.JPG

[vfilby]

You only have so much exposure latitude when taking a picture (does 2 stops in either direction sound right?). If the range between the smallest and largest EV is too big then something will be way over or way under exposed. So here is what you have to do: Basically take the photo at a time when there is enough natural light in the sky to light up the scene enough so that the you can expose both the moon and the scene properly.

Remember that you can always adjust the exposure so that it looks more like a 'night' shot.