The Moon

I hope anyone reading this is staying safe. I am doing my best to which is staying away from as many people as I can and wearing a mask when I can’t.

So I went out to get pictures of NEOWISE with a friend at Seven Magic Mountains outside of Las Vegas. We got some pictures of it. While we were there I pointed my camera at the moon and he seemed surprised when I told him my settings. They were 210mm, iso 400, f4.0, and 1/1250. From my experience of taking pictures of the moon only manual exposure works. If I had a greater focal length then it might not be an issue, currently though I am limited to 300mm max well technically it would be 450mm with the crop factor. It might work with adjusting the exposure compensation. I am of a mind that if I have the time I might as well go full manual if I need to adjust exposure comp.

The problem with small bright objects in a night frame is that they get blown out. The camera tries to bring the whole screen to an even exposure. A night scene generally doesn’t want that. A night sky is supposed to look nearly black. At 300mm the Moon doesn’t take up enough room in the frame to make a big difference to the sensor. So it treats it as a mostly dark frame and over exposes the moon, which leaves a bright spot in a black frame because the sensor is trying to get a curve in the histogram. It can’t because there is to much difference between the bright Moon and the dark sky. So you get an overexposed moon with very little detail. This was taken at 210mm 1/15 second iso 400 f5 which is what my camera meter said was was exposed properly. Click on it to zoom in for detail.

As seen above the camera doesn’t always know what is correct. Granted this has limited editing, I only changed the WB. If I wanted I could bring down some of the highlights and get more detail. Or I could not listen to the camera and get a better exposure. I took it again with what looked correct to me in manual. The camera said it was very under exposed. Click to zoom.

I included the full image in here to illustrate how little of the frame the moon will fill. With a longer focal length this might be a non issue. Even with a 300mm lens attached to a crop sensor it is still an issue. I hope this was informative. If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer. Again stay safe and wear a mask.

~Scott

Eclipses

Good morning,

There is an eclipse coming up on the 20th. I am hoping that it is not cloudy and I can see/photograph it. This is not my first go around with an eclipse. I have some photographs posted in the Celestial section on here. The set up for a Lunar and a Solar eclipse are a little different. I am just going to go with the Lunar right now.

There are a few ways to shoot an eclipse, a telephoto lens will capture it and show it off by filling the frame, a regular lens can capture some more of it and possibly a tight foreground, a wide angle can get a sprawling landscape with the moon in it as well. There can be a combination and photoshoping of multiple of these.

210mm and cropped to fill more of the frame. Without anything around it is rather plain.

Here is the blood moon that everyone raves about at 300mm and cropped as well.

I like these and the memories associated with them however there is not much depth to them. What we can do to add more depth is add buildings, cars, or some other foreground interest. There is also another option. Long exposure.

This is a 6415 second exposure of a lunar eclipse at 50mm.

Notice above I only have about half of the eclipse in the frame. If I would have been using a wide angle or super wide I could have gotten the whole thing in. The batteries probably would not have lasted the double the length of the exposure though. Make sure your batteries are charged completely.

Another option is to take multiple pictures and put them on a background in photoshop with layers. Spacing is key here and an intervalometer comes in handy for that part. I haven’t done this technique, I do plan on trying it. It should be roughly the same as the layer masks that I discussed back in December using car trails.

Good look with viewing the eclipse. I should have some pictures of it if the clouds stay away.

~Scott