Shooting at the Moon

Shoot­ing at the moon with a Point and Shoot cam­era is not an easy task and the lim­its of the cam­era become quickly obvi­ous. Yes­ter­day I have taken some shots as a test for tonight’s full-moon night.

This above is about as close as I got and I have tried out dif­fer­ent settings.

Equip­ment used:

• Tri­pod
• Point and Shoot Camera

The canm used is a Leica V-Lux-20 with 12 MP on a 1/2.33 Sensor.

With auto­matic set­tings, the moon just came back as a white disc on a black back­ground. The cam did not dis­tin­guish between the dif­fer­ent shades and reliefs on the sur­face of the moon.

The cam­era has opti­cal and dig­i­tal zoom sys­tems as well as an extended opti­cal zoom system.

The cam­era comes with a 12 x opti­cal zoom and and extended opti­cal zoom up to x 23.4. The extended opti­cal zoom uses only a reduced part of the sen­sor to pro­duce the pic­ture. The photo can then be enlarged accord­ingly. The cam­era also uses an intel­li­gent zoom sys­tem. This is a super res­o­lu­tion tech­nol­ogy by which the zoom ratio can be increased by 1.3 times with about no dete­ri­o­ra­tion of the pic­ture quality.

Check out your cam­era menu, you may find iZoom or some­thing sim­i­lar there.

Make sure, when you shoot at the moon, that the macro zoom is switched off.

In view of the lim­ited zoom range and the small size of the sen­sor, I put the empha­sis on set­tings where a max­i­mum of qual­ity (detail) is pre­served, rather than on speed or zoom (size of the moon in the frame).

To achieve this and to pre­vent noise, I am a friend of low ISO num­bers. Con­sid­er­ing the use of a tri­pod, time is no prob­lem, so if low ISO num­bers trig­ger longer expo­sure, the tri­pod will pre­vent the shake effect.

The cam­era will con­sider the moon as a whole at infi­nite dis­tance; blurs due to the spher­i­cal shape are not an issue with my mate­r­ial. How­ever, too low F-stop num­bers will increase expo­sure speed and from what my tests show, it’s prefer­able to com­pro­mise between aper­ture and speed.

I have started out with f/11 at 1/100 and I just got a white disc on black background.

The above shot shows a pos­si­ble compromise:

- Aper­ture: f/4.9

- Expo­sure time: 1/250 s

- ISO speed: ISO-80

- Spot meter­ing mode

- Focal length of 49 mm which is the equiv­a­lent of 399 mm in 35 mm format

- The pro­gram selec­tor was on Aper­ture Priority.

The best advise is: start with some set­tings and then play with aper­ture and shut­ter speed mov­ing them grad­u­ally and then select the best picture.

The blue-moon has been achieved by tint­ing one of yesterday’s pho­tos blue and by clean­ing the whites.

More tomor­row.

• the moon
• moon pho­tog­ra­phy
• moon pic­ture set­tings camera
• full moon taken with dig­i­tal camera
• moon photo dig­i­tal camera
• moon pic­tures with dig­i­tal camera
• photo shoot set­ting for full moon
• pho­tog­ra­phy of the moon
• blue moon photography
• pic­tures of the moon with dig­i­tal cameras

Related posts:

1. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 10
2. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 15
3. Dominique de Villepin
4. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 14
5. iPhone 4 Photo Cam­era Review 1

Tags: Full Moon Digital Photo, Full Moon Image, Vouliagmeni Full-moon, Yorgo Nestoridis

This entry was posted on August 24, 2010 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Digital Photography, Photo Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.