November 25th, 2009

So a good friend emailed me last night and said I should go shoot the moon . . . it's beautiful. So, in PJs, I headed out on the back porch with camera in hand, and sure enough, there's this great half moon in the sky. Shooting a moon isn't as tricky as you would think. I always shoot on manual when I try and capture the moon - that way, I can dial in the correct exposure. I start at 250th of a second at f/8 and go from there. The moon is bright, so a faster shutter speed is essential in getting any detail. This, unfortunately will leave everything else in shadow. In this case, there was a nice fluffy cloud just above the moon, but because I used such a high shutter speed, it fell to shadow . . . I shot with the 70-200mm VR - handheld. I tripod would only have slowed me down a bit . . . and I finally rested on a shutter speed of 400th of a second, so camera shake wasn't really an issue. ISO is down to 100.