Hi all,
I am hoping someone with some experience on this might be able to give me a few tips, or pointers on where I'm making a mistake. I just got myself a brand new nice lens, a Tamron 70-300 mm, and I really want to make one of those awesome moon closeups you see every now and then. I posted one today that I shot during the day, and it was quite sharp, but not excellent. I thought it would go much better at night as there'd be less scattered light, but I think I'm doing something wrong with focusing, it's not all that sharp.
But I'm really looking for advice on this one, which I posted on Flickr. If I get this down right, I'd love to post a night shot on my 365 as well.
See full size for better understanding of the unsharpness
What I have done so far is to ofcourse use a tripod and I used the self-timer to avoid camera-wobble. I shot the photo in RAW, to maintain as much detail. Cropped the photo by about a quarter, but for the purpose of clearly indicating the sharpness issue I did not use any other post-processing or sharpening.
Any tips, help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
I've only been able to have one good shoot of the moon. Usually, my tripod is too light. I know that, at least in my case, I:
1.) Need a heavier tripod. The one I use is light, as I drag it around landscapes.
2.) Always use the Mirror lock up feature, as , depending on the camera, the mirror can cause unwanted movement.
For a good "long" exposure, I want to get an Equatorial mount for the new tripod I don't have yet. This mount moves in conjunction with the spinning of the planet on long exposures, so there are no "streaks". The amount of stars the camera exposes are amazing. The eye cannot see them.
Hope my telling you my experiences or knowledge I cant afford may help!
I find if my moon shots I don't need a long exposure, heck with a little luck you can almost handheld the shot...
I find SR very helpful... the one pic of the moon I posted here was my first night out and I think I was ISO 400 (I think I could go lower on this) 300mm f/8 and 1/160
The moon is very bright, manual expsure is key and the reflecting sun will mess things up.
The remote or 2 sec delay is great, so is using live view or other mirror lock-ups.
You want no wind as that messes up the photo too...
good luck and I think I am going to shoot a shot of the moon right now... you have inspired me!
Thanks for the tip on the mirror lockup, didn't know about that feature, so looked it up on our good friend Google, and find my Nikon D5000 has a similar function, though a bit different:
"These include the so-called Exposure Delay Mode and Interval Timer Shooting. In Exposure Delay Mode, the mirror is flipped up when you tip the shutter release button, but the shutter itself only opens a second later, when the vibration caused by the mirror has more or less subsided. This is not quite the same thing as the mirror lock-up feature of the higher-specified Nikons - as you cannot set the time between raising the mirror and actually taking the shot -, but it's still quite an effective tool for maximising sharpness when shooting from a tripod. "
Going to try that, now it also makes sense why an exposure delay was present in the menu. Could not figure why anybody would like to make their camera react sluggish :-D Now I know. Hope we have a clear sky tonight!
In followup, I googled my Tamron lense and found other photographers experience something called chromatic aberration, and it looks very similar to what I get I think. Chromatic Abberation gets very technical, something to do with different colors of light being refracted differently through all the glass in a lense causing some colors of light to end up a bit off-subject on the camera's sensor, causing some colored fringing (like pouring white light through a prism and getting a rainbow I guess, only less drastic ;-) ). Wikipedia has a very good article on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberrations
Now I noticed that my idea to use RAW photos in this case might not have been the best idea, as I got this information from the same Wiki article (and I do happen to use a Nikon): "All Nikon DSLR's with C-MOS sensor and all Panasonic Lumix DSLR's, additionally some Nikon and Panasonic compact cameras, do such processing automatically in camera for JPEGs. Nikon DSLR's additionally store correction-data in RAW-files for use by Nikon Capture, View NX and some other RAW tools."
Also there seem to be some pretty good software solutions to reduce the amount of Chromatic Aberration as you can thow some quite complex mathematics against it. I might give that a try as well.
So, gameplan for the next moon:
-Tripod
-Selftimer on 2seconds
-Exposure delay (mirror lockup exposure delay of 1 second on Nikon D5000 to reduce camera wobble from the mirror clapping up and down)
-fine JPG Mode, possibly bracketed for multiple exposure levels
-Smaller aperture (should reduce fringing just a bit)
-In Post processing, if I can get it working, I'm going to give ChromaCute a go (http://www.chromacute.com/)
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1.) Need a heavier tripod. The one I use is light, as I drag it around landscapes.
2.) Always use the Mirror lock up feature, as , depending on the camera, the mirror can cause unwanted movement.
For a good "long" exposure, I want to get an Equatorial mount for the new tripod I don't have yet. This mount moves in conjunction with the spinning of the planet on long exposures, so there are no "streaks". The amount of stars the camera exposes are amazing. The eye cannot see them.
Hope my telling you my experiences or knowledge I cant afford may help!
I find SR very helpful... the one pic of the moon I posted here was my first night out and I think I was ISO 400 (I think I could go lower on this) 300mm f/8 and 1/160
The moon is very bright, manual expsure is key and the reflecting sun will mess things up.
The remote or 2 sec delay is great, so is using live view or other mirror lock-ups.
You want no wind as that messes up the photo too...
good luck and I think I am going to shoot a shot of the moon right now... you have inspired me!
"These include the so-called Exposure Delay Mode and Interval Timer Shooting. In Exposure Delay Mode, the mirror is flipped up when you tip the shutter release button, but the shutter itself only opens a second later, when the vibration caused by the mirror has more or less subsided. This is not quite the same thing as the mirror lock-up feature of the higher-specified Nikons - as you cannot set the time between raising the mirror and actually taking the shot -, but it's still quite an effective tool for maximising sharpness when shooting from a tripod. "
Going to try that, now it also makes sense why an exposure delay was present in the menu. Could not figure why anybody would like to make their camera react sluggish :-D Now I know. Hope we have a clear sky tonight!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberrations
Now I noticed that my idea to use RAW photos in this case might not have been the best idea, as I got this information from the same Wiki article (and I do happen to use a Nikon):
"All Nikon DSLR's with C-MOS sensor and all Panasonic Lumix DSLR's, additionally some Nikon and Panasonic compact cameras, do such processing automatically in camera for JPEGs. Nikon DSLR's additionally store correction-data in RAW-files for use by Nikon Capture, View NX and some other RAW tools."
Also there seem to be some pretty good software solutions to reduce the amount of Chromatic Aberration as you can thow some quite complex mathematics against it. I might give that a try as well.
So, gameplan for the next moon:
-Tripod
-Selftimer on 2seconds
-Exposure delay (mirror lockup exposure delay of 1 second on Nikon D5000 to reduce camera wobble from the mirror clapping up and down)
-fine JPG Mode, possibly bracketed for multiple exposure levels
-Smaller aperture (should reduce fringing just a bit)
-In Post processing, if I can get it working, I'm going to give ChromaCute a go (http://www.chromacute.com/)