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Photographer@lemmy.world

South Hillsboro, OR. (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by tanisnikana@lemmy.world to c/photography@lemmy.world

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Sure, it’s a moon I captured on a slightly hazy night, but I wanted to really test out my tripod and telephoto lens and capture something my cell phone would just repeatedly fail at. Ended up going with a one-second shutter after a two-second timer so my hand wouldn’t mess with the tripod balance, and with ISO 100, I had a long enough window to capture good detail on the moon, at least as much as my 75-300m f/4-5.6 telephoto lens would allow. There’s bigger lenses that do more daring stuff, but this one is mine.

Thanks for seeing some really big sky cheese!

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[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Moooooon!

Before I get into the usual kibitzing-on-the-internet thing: Great shot!

Something to bear in mind about the moon specifically is that you can throw away most of your astrophography habits, and along with all of their damned complexity.

The moon can be shot at using exposure settings pretty close to what you'd use for sunlit terrestrial scenes. That's because the moon is... lit by direct sunlight.

I took this one at 800mm using my telephoto extender, hand held (!) at ISO-100 and a mere 1/50 sec, and through a veritable pinhole of ƒ/16 because I was vainly attempting to get it as sharp as possible. Although come to think of it, extended that far I'm not sure my current lens can get much more open than that anyway. Whether or not I succeeded at this is up for debate, but as long as your arms don't get tired holding up your camera and lens you can use a short enough exposure to leave your tripod and remote release and all behind.

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ooooh.

(I do have to take my tripod with me, as I have some substantial physical difficulties and can’t even use a regular telephoto lens without a tripod. Turns out, I’m not stable. Don’t have strokes, kids.)

I should really try a high stop value for aperture for my next moonshot!

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

You don't necessarily have to stop your aperture down that far, but I suspect you should be able to use a much shorter shutter time. That'll cut down your overexposure and possibly also help with the color fringing around the edges.

There will be a sweet spot of aperture for your lens where the sharpness and chromatic aberration (color fringing) are at their minimum. This is unlikely to be at the extreme open end (low ƒ number) or far down into the extreme closed end (high ƒ number). You can experiment to find where this is for your particular lens, though. The beauty of shooting digital is that film is free and you can review your results right away.

ƒ-16 was probably actually too small an aperture for my shot, but it worked well enough.

[–] troglodytis@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

South Hillsboro? No no, that's the moon. People get those confused all the time

[–] KevinFRK@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

In passing, since you are learning about RAW format processing, you can do some quite extreme things to the luminance/histogram/gamma/whatever to bring out a little more detail in these sorts of shots, because the range of tones is rather narrow. Some also have fun boosting one of the colour components - "Mineral moon processing".

If you get addicted to trying for the best possible moon shot, you may find https://clearoutside.com/forecast/ Useful for knowing when the nights will be clear

Also, don't discount early morning/evening moon photos - there can still be enough details to make the effort worthwhile even in daylight (if you play with the RAW).

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Oh! I haven’t even gotten these into Darktable! I had just crashed out when I got home, and posted the JPG during a break at work! I’ll play with editing this tonight.