Is a moon shot with an A540 possible?

Hello everyone. I am new to the forum and new to digital photography. On the advice of an experienced user, I purchased a Canon A540 for it's ease of use and extra manual shooting features.

The moon has been spectacular and I have been attempting to get some photos but every attempt has failed miserably. And again - I am very new at this.

Does anyone have any tips or even better instructions for getting a photo of the moon at night using an A540 or similar camera? I have seen some posts on this forum but most discuss the "S" type cameras, unless I am looking in the wrong place.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

With relatively little light coming from the moon,
you will need a fairly long exposure so camera shake will be a problem.
A tripod is ideal but a little beanbag or similar also works
try making lots of exposures using differant settings and the camera will teach you .
Pete

This might help. I took these pics last night with my a620. Shot with a tripod in manual mode, f8, iso50, x4 optical zoom and just changing the shutter speeds.
Just wish i had more zoom

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Transit wrote in post #2096166
With relatively little light coming from the moon,
you will need a fairly long exposure so camera shake will be a problem.

the moon is a lot brighter than you think, the reason why most cameras pick a slow shutter is because of all of the black in the scene, to correctly expose the moon you need a lot fast shutter than you think and the more you zoom in to it the faster you need to go. On my G6 i used to use around 1/160th and with a 300mm lens on my 20D it can be as high at 1/1000th if it is very bright.

With my S3, I had to switch to spot metering the moon, as opposed to evaluative metering, in order to get the camera to correctly set the aperture and shutter speed. Even then, I generally put the camera in Tv mode and set the shutter speed myself. I adjust the shutter speed until the camera chooses an aperture that is at least f/8.0.

Thanks for all of the help. Nice pictures jkdlee! If I could get something like those I'd be happy.

It's clouding up here today. I wish I had the time to find this forum a couple of days ago. Hopefully it will still be clear enough for me to try these hints tonight.

With my S3 I used manual mode, ISO80, f/3.5, zoom at max and the shutter and 1/300 (or whatever puts the graph in the middle)

How come?

I was able to get a few pictures last night but I'm not happy yet.

Like I said I am new at this. I eventually realized I would need to utilize the digital zoom on the camera. I finally also figured out how to set the aperture and shutter speed in manual mode (I hate to admit it - i could not find the +/- button on the camera). Once I found it - it's easy.

I'm still struggling with manual focus in manual mode - but I think I at least know how to do it.

Unfortunately it looks like clouds and rain the next few days here.

Hey man, i know how do you feel now! i have the same camera.. and here is the photo i took from moon. i will show cropped version and uncropped-but resized- version

so by seeing the A620 pictures i think that's the best moon photo we can achieve

NOTE: the moon on my place (i'm on Lima, Peru) looks smaller than your place.. i've used a combined 16X zoom (12x digital) with this camera) Everybody check exif data please

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Hi gaban06,

I think your photo is over exposed - remember it is daytime on the part of the moon you can see!
I don't think you will get much better detail but less exposure will make it more realistic. Using so much digital zoom does not really help.
EXIF says f/6.3 so stopping down to f/8 probably won't give any more resolution. Optimum resolution on a lens is usually 2 f/stops below maximum aperature so a f/3.5 is optimum at f/5.6 - there would be little difference between f/5.6 and f/6.3.
One thing you can do is put your camera to the eyepiece of a decent set of binoculars and get an optical zoom boost that way. It works well for the moon because it is so bringht but you have to hold the binoculars and the camera on some sort of mount (tripod?) and probaly use a 2 second shutter delay so the camera is totally steady by the time the shutter goes off.

the moon and earth are always on the move and that's why you need a fast shutter also.

As a very rough guide I'd start off at ISO 100 1/250th at f/5.6 and bracket around from there. Ignore the metering from the camera (unless you have a separate spot meter) as it will be totally fooled by the great expanse of dark sky. Use a tripod if you can, not for the shutter speeds as these are realtively high but just to reduce camera movement as much as possible. Because even if you get the exposure absolutely right your still going to have to crop the image quite a lot, you'd need a very long focal length to fill the frame without cropping!

hope that helps, have fun with it

Transit wrote in post #2096166
With relatively little light coming from the moon,
you will need a fairly long exposure so camera shake will be a problem.
A tripod is ideal but a little beanbag or similar also works
try making lots of exposures using differant settings and the camera will teach you .
Pete

As others pointed out, this is wrong. You can use the Sunny-16 rule for the moon since it is a sun-lit object. 1/100th of second on ISO 100 at f/16 is about the right exposure.

A good source is this: http://www.calphoto.co​m/moon.htm which explains why sunny-16 is only for the full moon high in the sky.