Just have to say !

[Marshy]

Hi Guys , hope you all had a good easter , i,ve just got back from a relaxing w,end in Wales . Wife wasn,t there so spent most of it bonding with my 300 and 70 - 200L lense , heaven . Like a few other members i was initially not blown away by the pics out of camera compared to my old G3 , not so now it really is a patience thing , i can capture subjects that were only a dream before . Need some advice though , tried to take a pic of full moon and the light it was casting on the sea , failed woefully . Got the moon , sort of , but a big white blob no detail , and the water ok,ish as thumbnail but full screen , awfull , help please . Only way i knew how to try was in AV as low as i could get it , help please ?

[BearSummer]

Hi Marshy,

Glad you had a nice time in Wales with your new lens. The trouble with photographing the moon is that it obeys the sunny 16 rule (an object that is directly lit buy the sun on a sunny day should be exposed at f16 with a shutter speed of 1/(your film iso), so if you are shooting iso 100 the you would shoot f16 at 1/100 second), which in the middle of the night will turn everything else will be black. So what you need to do is get a range of ND grad filters and have the moon in the ND grad area and the sea in the clear area, I would guess a 2 or 3 stop filter should do and you should be able to get your reflections and some of the dark landscape. The other option is to take multiple pictures and expose for each part of the scene, f16 for the moon, f8 for the water reflections and f4 for the moon lit land, then blend them together carefully, hopefully it wont look to faked.

Best regards and good luck

BearSummer

[Marshy]

Thank you Bearsummer , i,m new to dslr , what a steep learning curve ! It was a shame , full moon clear sky no light pollution , tide was in so reflections were fantastic and i missed the moment , never mind another time maybe , at least i am armed with your guidance , thank you again .

[tim]

For the moon, shoot in Manual mode and play with the settings until you can see detail in the LCD preview. Set it to ISO 100 and F12 or so as initial settings, meter with Av to get a shutter speed and probably knock it down a bit from there. Then it's just trial and error.