Such a great night...Moon??

So I took a few photo and realized that I have a lot of trouble getting the moon in focus even in manual. I can not get detail even when zoomed all the way in and looking tack sharp in the view finder... What gives??? What am i missing??

You're missing the fact that the moon is actually a sunlit subject, and therefore, you have to use settings that you'd use on any, other daylight subject in order to get it properly exposed. Unless some fairly specific lighting conditions exist (externally lit buildings, etc), any shot that you see properly exposed city/ground, at night, and a properly exposed moon are composite shots.

The moon is way over exposed in those shots. It is generally somewhere around 1/125 at f5.6 at ISO 100. Think about it, the moon is basically daylight bright.

+1 to the above. The moon is so over exposed that all the detail is blown out. The only way to get detail into the moon in a shot like that would be to take two or more exposures and blend them.

Thanks for the feedback.. I totally never thought of it like you'll were saying but get it now. It is like a big reflector so it should be treated as such. I had one photo that was better but not great that was at 1/30s and see now what I was doing wrong.

Good thing their calling for clear skies tonight and it is the full moon.. Praying for better luck tonight.

ThomasDidymus wrote in post #17944398
Thanks for the feedback.. I totally never thought of it like you'll were saying but get it now. It is like a big reflector so it should be treated as such. I had one photo that was better but not great that was at 1/30s and see now what I was doing wrong.

Good thing their calling for clear skies tonight and it is the full moon.. Praying for better luck tonight.

It's great that you'll have another chance to do this tonight.

As others have said above, the moon has full, clear sunlight on it, and needs to be treated as such. If today is clear and sunny, go out at high noon and take a meter reading of something that is in full sun. That is basically the same exposure you should use for photographing the moon at night, if you want the moon itself to look good and to have visible detail.

Just keep in mind that the moon will be in a different position than it was the other night, and that you may not be able to compose things up the way you did in the image you posted. You may also have to shoot at a different time of night to get the moon relatively low in the sky.

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Remember Sunny 16?

There's also Looney 11: f/11 for full moon, f/8 for half moon.

Since you are in the US this might help, as you still have a few hours before dark. I came home an hour ago 18:00 GMT and the sun was not yet quite set, but the moon was well up over the horizon and showing quite well. This is a good time to shoot the moon, while having plenty of detail in the sky/background. Also to get a good shot of the moon with detail you need a long focal length 300mm is probably as short as you want to go, although 400mm or even 600mm would be much better. To then get some scenery etc in the background you need to be a goodly distance away from it while still keeping the moon looking large in the frame. If you don't use a really long lens even if you have the exposure correct you still wind up with a tiny little dot for the moon.

To be frank although the full moon looks great with the naked eye, it is actually very flat as the sun is falling directly on the surface. The moon looks much better when shot at about half way, as then the moon is more side lit, and there is more definition from the shadows thrown by the surface features.

Here's an example of what I am talking about, a few years ago I was shooting an airshow at the IWM Duxford, and there was a nice bright crescent moon right in the middle of the day, and this was towards the end of May by the way. So anyway I took some shots of the moon at 400mm with a 100-400 L (original version obviously) as that was the focal length I was shooting with mostly on the zoom. Unfortunately thanks to the positioning of the flight line it was not possible to get the aircraft and the moon nicely aligned in camera. By using the same FL for both the aircraft and the moon it was very easy to combine both images in PS, with no problems caused by resampling either image. This is the final image, the two frames were merged at the original size, but the image was then extensively cropped too, to get the frame to be filled.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/eaXK​D5

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/eaS9​3X

Thank you all so much... Got another thing checked off my photo bucket list for now..

Here is another one that I like..

They look a bit underexposed. Sorry if I am the cause of this with that first link I gave you. With digital cameras, where you can set the exposure to within 1/3 of a stop, you can set 1/100 as the shutter speed for ISO 100.

One advantage of underexposure is that you didn't blow out the highlights, so you can just up your exposure value in your RAW processor.

I dropped the exposure a bit in post so that I looked good as a background for my Pc. screen. might have went a bit far..

Ah, OK. And, ah I see.

Yup, like about one stop too low.

ThomasDidymus wrote in post #17946557
I dropped the exposure a bit in post so that I looked good as a background for my Pc. screen. might have went a bit far..

If you have your screen set at around the brightness it came from the factory, then it is probably set to be at least a stop too bright. This makes you bring the exposure down too far in post. If you the have a print made the print comes out too dark.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #17947324
If you have your screen set at around the brightness it came from the factory, then it is probably set to be at least a stop too bright. This makes you bring the exposure down too far in post. If you the have a print made the print comes out too dark.

Alan

An interesting obesrvation. Each of my two iMacs came about a stop darker than the correct brightness, which is the opposite of what you claim. The "stop too bright" computers you speak of - are they Macs, or are they Windows-based machines?

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