I've seen many outstanding moon pictures posted here over the years. The best ones show the surface of the moon in detail. Last night I went out to take a picture and noticed the moon I saw above me in the clear sky looked like a flat white disc and that's what my picture showed--no detail. So is that because of atmospheric conditions, time of night, or the fact that I live in an area with street lights? Today it's raining so I don't guess I'll get to try for a Supermoon shot but if it looked like last night's picture there's not really much incentive anyway.
BTW, I have a Nikon Coolpix 510 with a 42X zoom and I tried on auto and night landscape. I didn't use a tripod but I did rest my camera on a solid surface.
Any insights would be appreciated.
I'm having some issues with my monitor, actually as of right now I have a new monitor that I'm not quite used to. That being said the picture I took of the moon last night was too bright and had no detail, I fiddled around with it in LR to get the surface detail to show up.
I took this one in the city too, I didn't have to do that when I took a picture of the moon out in the country. I thought maybe I had my ISO up too high or something. I'm not sure really so this probably isn't much help to you.
The biggest problem with moon shots is the exposure. You do not have to be in the country. The moon is much brighter than you or your camera think. I set my exposure at least two stops darker than my meter thinks is right. All that dark night fools the camera. Search the tag moon and when you find pics you like check the exif info and use those as a start for exposure.
@allie912 Your not alone Allison I took a photo last night of the moon I had several different shots and believe It or not my come out like a white glow ball could not even see the craters on the Moon like other times I did not use a tripod Ither
- center/spot metering (centered on the moon). The moon gets whiter and clearer, and the sky darker
- manual focus. I get better results using Live View and the Live View zoom for fine tuning
- try a lot of shots. I did around 40 shots, and I was happy with some 15. Refocus each time.
- underexposure can help you if the sky is still too light
- having a very firm hand or a tripod
The picture I uploaded had just some light sharpening, decreased saturation (the moon was a little too yellowish...) and cropping to zoom in.
Firstly, although it's easy to think that the best time to photograph the moon is when it's full, that's not always the case. When the moon appears full, it is being lit head-on by the sun, which means that there are no shadows and the surface will appear very flat.
You'll usually get a more interesting photo when the moon is between 1/4 and 3/4 full, when the light from the sun hits it at an angle, and hence causes shadows to be cast by the edges of the craters of the moon. Photographing the moon at these times will make it appear much more three-dimensional.
However, that's not to say that shooting a full moon isn't worth doing. As has been mentioned already, the main difficulty with photographing the moon (at any phase) is that it is a much much brighter object than most people realise.
It's also very hard to get it to fill the frame unless you have a ridiculous zoom lens (or telescope), which means that it's typically surrounded by complete darkness. This means that the camera, on default settings, will attempt to expose the overall photo, almost all of which is darkness, with only a small bit of moon, and hence will choose a much brighter exposure than desired, overexposing the moon and making it appear a white blob.
You can use exposure compensation or guess manual settings if you like to get the exposure right, but there are also a couple of other ways you can do it.
The first way is to switch your camera to 'spot metering' mode, which will tell the camera to use only the very central spot in the frame to determine what exposure to use. Usually the moon will easily fill this spot (if you frame it centrally), so simply by switching to spot metering, your exposures will become pretty accurate. There's actually a currently running challenge, CSC-28, all about using spot metering, so this is an excellent chance to try it out!
The second way is to use a rule of thumb. Some people will be familiar with the Sunny 16 rule for getting accurate exposures in direct sunlight, and the good news is that there's also a Looney 11 rule.
This says that if you set your aperture to f/11, and your shutter speed to the same as 1/ISO, then you will get a well-exposed shot of the moon. (In other words, if your ISO is 100, then you would set the shutter speed to 1/100, if your ISO is 400, you would set it to 1/400, etc.)
This is nice and easy to remember and a good way to practice with using your camera in fully manual mode, if you haven't tried it before.
Regarding tripods, you can probably see from the rule that you can get away without a tripod if you bump up the ISO a bit, or have an image-stabilised lens. Most image-stabilised telephotos will be pretty sharp at 1/100th second, so you can simply use f/11, ISO 100, 1/100th, and shoot. If you don't have image stabilisation then you'll have to either use a tripod or a higher ISO -- around f/11, ISO 400, 1/400th will work well for hand-holding non-stabilised lenses.
Feel free to ask any questions, and in the meantime, I'll leave you with a photo of the moon:
@abirkill You are always such an incredible help and I truly enjoy reading your explanations. Hip hip hurray for Alexis! I'm going to see if I can get a moon shot for the settings challenge. I got a moon shot the last "super moon" and was shocked I could actually get it with my zoom and hand held--this is it. Looking to see if I can do better now that I am hoping to get a good one with the new info (that may just jinx me, however! lol).
@darylo No problem! That's a pretty awesome shot though, I think you already have a technique that works well for you!
If you want to start to get into advanced moon photography, you can look into doing what is known as 'stacking' images. This is where you take multiple shots of the moon in quick succession and combine them in post-processing. What this does is remove atmospheric distortions, slight motion blur, and so on from the individual photos to create a final image that is sharper and more detailed.
This is an advanced technique and involves a lot of steps, but can result in good improvements if you can master it. The shot I posted was made from 23 stacked images of the moon. Here's one of the individual photos -- you should be able to see it's not quite as sharp or detailed:
If you do want to investigate this as a way to get sharper moon shots, there's a tutorial on Youtube here:
@abirkill yes. Stacking is on the list of things I do hope to do!! I still have to try the black card trick!! So many fun things to learn. Cant believe how much I've learned in 6 short months.
Hello Allison - I thought you might find my use of the Nikon Coolpix P500 to do moon shots of interest. The setting I normally use is night landscape, but I set the exposure two full stops lower to get the detail on the moon to show clearly (when you take a moon shot there is a lot of dark sky and a much smaller area of bright moon, so the camera is fooled into overexposing the moon surface without this adjustment). This is an example of a shot taken this way in my solo project last year - http://365project.org/if1/365/2012-08-31
@fishers@abirkill What wonderful suggestions I will hope to try this evening if the cloud cover blows away. However no one has answered part of my question. If all I see when I look up at the moon is a flat white disk, can the camera do better than that? Certainly I have seen "the man in the moon" but he sure wasn't showing his face last night. I'm wondering if the ambient light of the city is preventing a detailed image.
Allison, the shot in my link was taken from my garden in the city of York, UK, so there was some ambient light. I could see some detail with the naked eye, but more detail was visible in the shot itself.
@abirkill Is stacking possible to do using HDR? Or does HDR only work if you have each photo at a different setting? I think the answer is the latter, but am not sure and don't have a stacking program with Aperture or the plug-ins I have that go with it.
@allie912 If you can't see any detail in the moon with your eye, the camera is unlikely to do much better than that.
Being in a city shouldn't cause any problems -- the moon is very bright and will more than overwhelm even the brightest city lights. Poor atmospheric conditions (thin layers of high cloud) would probably be the most likely cause.
If you can clearly see bright stars then you should be able to capture detail in the moon, but if the stars aren't visible, or appear fuzzy or diffused, then the chances are you won't get detail in the moon either. This would also cause the edges of the moon to look fuzzy rather than crisp and sharply defined (at least when viewed through a zoom lens).
@taffy Both stacking and HDR use multiple shots of the same subject, but HDR uses shots of different exposures, whereas stacking uses shots of the same exposure.
There are freely available programs for doing stacking that you can use -- for my photo I used a program called RegiStax which is free, and that's also the software that is described in the YouTube tutorial. As you mention Aperture I'm guessing you might use a Mac -- I'm sure there are similar programs available, but I'm not familiar enough with them to know any by name.
Photoshop also offers a 'median stack' mode which does a very similar thing, but unfortunately it's only available in the very expensive CS Extended edition.
After trying over the years to get a shot of the moon that didn't end up just a white blob, I finally discovered the right combination of camera and settings last night!
I recently bought a Fuji X-S1 ...the settings for this shot....ISO 100, 1/250 and F10 (got shots using anything between F8 and F11). Image was just cropped, otherwise SOOC.
Used a tripod but did manage to get a reasonable shot just handheld.
The main difference between using this camera and my others...the superzoom lens! It really made a difference!
I was so exited when I checked the images to see how they turned out! For once I could see detail, not just a white bright disc!
On and I forgot to say this was taken in my very small back yard, in suburbia, so although I would like to have been able to frame the moon with trees or something, it proves that you can get a shot long as you have the right combination of settings and zoom!
Here's my effort at a quick one shot image, hand held with a zoom with good image stabilization. And it is best, even if you have determined the exposure values from spot metering, dial in one to two stops of negative exposure compensation just to make sure you don't blow any highlights. And shoot with the lowest ISO you can. You don't want to have to apply copious noise mitigation which will only soften the image. You can always pull the image into something like Camera Raw in Photoshop and adjust the exposure, contrast, clarity, noise and sharpness provided you have a raw file that has nothing blown out. Even the color if you want a silvery moon rather than the natural gold of the reflected sunlight.
Stacking, and especially shooting from a stable tripod can certainly produce images that are somewhat sharper. But attachment to a decent home telescope is about the only way for significant improvement.
I have been trying to get a decent shot of the moon the last few months. Every time the moon was due to be full-ish I would plan a shoot but something always happened... either it was overcast or I check in the morning and it was slightly out of focus or the camera settings just weren't right. This time I took my laptop with me and checked the shots as I went, altering settings as required until I got something I was happy with.
The settings I found worked for me were ISO100, f11, 1/100.. all the 1's! lol
Slightly bumped the clarity to enhance the craters but besides that generally unedited.
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I took this one in the city too, I didn't have to do that when I took a picture of the moon out in the country. I thought maybe I had my ISO up too high or something. I'm not sure really so this probably isn't much help to you.
Some tips (I use a DSLR):
- center/spot metering (centered on the moon). The moon gets whiter and clearer, and the sky darker
- manual focus. I get better results using Live View and the Live View zoom for fine tuning
- try a lot of shots. I did around 40 shots, and I was happy with some 15. Refocus each time.
- underexposure can help you if the sky is still too light
- having a very firm hand or a tripod
The picture I uploaded had just some light sharpening, decreased saturation (the moon was a little too yellowish...) and cropping to zoom in.
Good luck
You'll usually get a more interesting photo when the moon is between 1/4 and 3/4 full, when the light from the sun hits it at an angle, and hence causes shadows to be cast by the edges of the craters of the moon. Photographing the moon at these times will make it appear much more three-dimensional.
However, that's not to say that shooting a full moon isn't worth doing. As has been mentioned already, the main difficulty with photographing the moon (at any phase) is that it is a much much brighter object than most people realise.
It's also very hard to get it to fill the frame unless you have a ridiculous zoom lens (or telescope), which means that it's typically surrounded by complete darkness. This means that the camera, on default settings, will attempt to expose the overall photo, almost all of which is darkness, with only a small bit of moon, and hence will choose a much brighter exposure than desired, overexposing the moon and making it appear a white blob.
You can use exposure compensation or guess manual settings if you like to get the exposure right, but there are also a couple of other ways you can do it.
The first way is to switch your camera to 'spot metering' mode, which will tell the camera to use only the very central spot in the frame to determine what exposure to use. Usually the moon will easily fill this spot (if you frame it centrally), so simply by switching to spot metering, your exposures will become pretty accurate. There's actually a currently running challenge, CSC-28, all about using spot metering, so this is an excellent chance to try it out!
The second way is to use a rule of thumb. Some people will be familiar with the Sunny 16 rule for getting accurate exposures in direct sunlight, and the good news is that there's also a Looney 11 rule.
This says that if you set your aperture to f/11, and your shutter speed to the same as 1/ISO, then you will get a well-exposed shot of the moon. (In other words, if your ISO is 100, then you would set the shutter speed to 1/100, if your ISO is 400, you would set it to 1/400, etc.)
This is nice and easy to remember and a good way to practice with using your camera in fully manual mode, if you haven't tried it before.
Regarding tripods, you can probably see from the rule that you can get away without a tripod if you bump up the ISO a bit, or have an image-stabilised lens. Most image-stabilised telephotos will be pretty sharp at 1/100th second, so you can simply use f/11, ISO 100, 1/100th, and shoot. If you don't have image stabilisation then you'll have to either use a tripod or a higher ISO -- around f/11, ISO 400, 1/400th will work well for hand-holding non-stabilised lenses.
Feel free to ask any questions, and in the meantime, I'll leave you with a photo of the moon:
If you want to start to get into advanced moon photography, you can look into doing what is known as 'stacking' images. This is where you take multiple shots of the moon in quick succession and combine them in post-processing. What this does is remove atmospheric distortions, slight motion blur, and so on from the individual photos to create a final image that is sharper and more detailed.
This is an advanced technique and involves a lot of steps, but can result in good improvements if you can master it. The shot I posted was made from 23 stacked images of the moon. Here's one of the individual photos -- you should be able to see it's not quite as sharp or detailed:
If you do want to investigate this as a way to get sharper moon shots, there's a tutorial on Youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sTcrONM24w
Good luck with your efforts!
Ian
Allison, the shot in my link was taken from my garden in the city of York, UK, so there was some ambient light. I could see some detail with the naked eye, but more detail was visible in the shot itself.
Ian
Being in a city shouldn't cause any problems -- the moon is very bright and will more than overwhelm even the brightest city lights. Poor atmospheric conditions (thin layers of high cloud) would probably be the most likely cause.
If you can clearly see bright stars then you should be able to capture detail in the moon, but if the stars aren't visible, or appear fuzzy or diffused, then the chances are you won't get detail in the moon either. This would also cause the edges of the moon to look fuzzy rather than crisp and sharply defined (at least when viewed through a zoom lens).
@taffy Both stacking and HDR use multiple shots of the same subject, but HDR uses shots of different exposures, whereas stacking uses shots of the same exposure.
There are freely available programs for doing stacking that you can use -- for my photo I used a program called RegiStax which is free, and that's also the software that is described in the YouTube tutorial. As you mention Aperture I'm guessing you might use a Mac -- I'm sure there are similar programs available, but I'm not familiar enough with them to know any by name.
Photoshop also offers a 'median stack' mode which does a very similar thing, but unfortunately it's only available in the very expensive CS Extended edition.
I recently bought a Fuji X-S1 ...the settings for this shot....ISO 100, 1/250 and F10 (got shots using anything between F8 and F11). Image was just cropped, otherwise SOOC.
Used a tripod but did manage to get a reasonable shot just handheld.
The main difference between using this camera and my others...the superzoom lens! It really made a difference!
I was so exited when I checked the images to see how they turned out! For once I could see detail, not just a white bright disc!
On and I forgot to say this was taken in my very small back yard, in suburbia, so although I would like to have been able to frame the moon with trees or something, it proves that you can get a shot long as you have the right combination of settings and zoom!
http://365project.org/discuss/themes-competitions/18258/camera-settings-challenge-28-spot-metering
Here's my effort at a quick one shot image, hand held with a zoom with good image stabilization. And it is best, even if you have determined the exposure values from spot metering, dial in one to two stops of negative exposure compensation just to make sure you don't blow any highlights. And shoot with the lowest ISO you can. You don't want to have to apply copious noise mitigation which will only soften the image. You can always pull the image into something like Camera Raw in Photoshop and adjust the exposure, contrast, clarity, noise and sharpness provided you have a raw file that has nothing blown out. Even the color if you want a silvery moon rather than the natural gold of the reflected sunlight.
Stacking, and especially shooting from a stable tripod can certainly produce images that are somewhat sharper. But attachment to a decent home telescope is about the only way for significant improvement.
The settings I found worked for me were ISO100, f11, 1/100.. all the 1's! lol
Slightly bumped the clarity to enhance the craters but besides that generally unedited.