24 March, 2011

Shooting the moon

Just a day before....

"You should shoot the moon on Saturday. It will be closest to earth, once in 18 years opportunity", said my friend to me. "But, we are going to Sai's marriage on Saturday", I exclaimed.
"So what? Take your camera and we shoot there in the night", suggested my friend.
"Taking my DSLR to marriage and taking photos. No way. Everyone will think of me as a marriage photographer", I explained my concern (it has different meanings in India).

Not liking the idea to take photos on my friends marriage day, I decided to shoot the moon on Friday, a day before the super moon. So it went like this.

I took my crappy tripod, which I baught for my point-and-shoot Fuji, I headed to the top of the building around 10'o  clock in the night. The night was calm and I was excited. But I never shot the moon before. Nor did I read anywhere until then on the technique. So my experiments started.

Setting my Pentax K-x on Av mode, I set the aperture at f5.6 at 300mm of the Sigma 70-300mm DG Macro lens. The first shot was taken and I was eagerly looking at the LCD only to see a blob rather than a crisp moon. What the hell?

I thought the light is more and the picture is not crisp and so I set the aperture to f8. The shutter speed went to 1/20. Thats too slow and the result? Once again a blob. And so I again.........
.....
.....
This experimentation went for a while, the shutter clicked for almost 30 times...every time either I got a blob, under exposed moon or over exposed moon picture. So whats next? Lets depend on the manual exposure.

I set the DSLR to manual mode. And now the testing begins. Initially I set the shutter speed to 1/150, aperture to f5.6 and ISO to 200. Hurray.............................................................

.............I again got a blob..................

So i decided to test the smaller apertures. I took pictures at every f stop after f5.6. The results started getting better from f11. And I observed that the picture is better than all others at f16. But its not the best I can settle with. So I made the shutter click faster at 1/250th of a second. Hurray......................................................

I got a crisp moon. I love it. I think you too love it :-)






What happened after f16? Either I started seeing grain (even at ISO 200 of my K-x) or its getting under exposed. Ok. Whats the time now? Its already 11:30 PM. I shot few more pics at - ISO 200, f16 and 1/250 at 300mm of the lens. Headed down to my house, eager to see the pics on my notebook.

You know I am pleased with the result and learned something about shooting moon ;-)

Thanks
Gunasekhar

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