The moon is one of the most interesting subjects to photograph. Each day brings to you a new face of the moon and a new way to look at it and photograph it. The moon has so many features on it, and a good photograph will bring out all those surface features on the moon leaving you very happy and pleased with the results.
However, photographing the moon is not very straight forward and easy as it looks. A scene with the moon can be so deceptive that most cameras that don’t have the correct settings set manually, will never be able to capture the moon and all its detail.
The first thing about moon photography is to understand the scene. Usually the moon will be in a dark background and will be the only clearly visible object in the sky. When you take a photograph, the camera sees most of the object as black and will try to overexpose to try and get the back in detail. It doesn’t realize that you are trying to photograph the moon and not the night sky. This is where you come in and do a few adjustments on the camera.
If you leave aside the night sky, then you will realize that the moon is an incredibly bright object in the night sky. You have to approach moon photography just like you approach day time photography. However, moon photography, thankfully, is not one thing that required the use of a lot of manual settings. It is of course an option to go manual on the moon, but it is just not necessary provided you have the right features on your camera.
Zoom: The first thing to look for is optical zoom. The longer the zoom you have, the more details on the moon you can capture and the more impressed you will be with your photograph.
Metering: The next thing is to check out whether you have ‘spot metering’ function. Using a spot metering mode ensure that you have metered for the moon and not for the night sky. This will ensure that a fairly high shutter speed is used, prevent blur due to hand shakes, and also that the moon is not over-exposed and too bright.
Focus: This is a tricky part. Most non-SLRs use contrast detection. If you have a good zoom and you are trying to focus bang in the center of the moon, you will not go anywhere. You have to focus at the edges of the moon. The black and white contract is the best and your camera will pick up that very accurately.
Once you have all these, it just required a steady hand and you can start shooting. You can produce some amazingly sharp results if you use a tripod.
Tips: Full moon are the brightest and the easiest to photograph handheld. Half moon and crescents are the most interesting to photograph since you can see so many features of the moon along the illuminated edges as compared to a full moon.
Some photo of the moon from Flickr available for distribution under Creative Commons license.
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