P#6 Q#4a: How Do You Capture Really Great Shots of the Moon?
Keys to creating an interesting photograph of the moon
Another subscriber said he's an astronomy buff, but whenever he tries to photograph the moon, it just comes out as a white disk.
What's he doing wrong, and what can he do to get interesting shots of the moon? Jim Zuckerman explains how to handle this special situation.
A tip for photos that include the moon and a cityscape
Jim Zuckerman: That's one of the biggest problems that I see when I critique students with my online classes and they shoot the moon.
I have two approaches. One is if you want to shoot the moon all by itself.
The moon is basically as bright as daylight on the earth. So you use a daylight exposure. If you have 100 ISO, your exposure can be roughly 1/250th of a second at f8. If you use that, you will get good detail in the lunar surface.
See, the problem comes in if you want to include the moon in a landscape or a cityscape.
If you expose correctly for the cityscape -- let's say you want to do twilight -- so you use the proper exposure for twilight on the earth, and you've got a full moon or a crescent moon, that wouldn't matter. The moon is going to become overexposed. There's absolutely nothing you can do about that.
If you expose correctly for the moon, then the cityscape or landscape is going to be hopelessly dark.
The only solution, the only solution is to take two pictures and put them together in Photoshop. You have to take two separate exposures, one for the moon and one for the land portion, and assemble them using Photoshop. Then you can have a perfect combination.
It's frustrating because our eyes can detect both. Our brain makes a great exposure on the land and then we look at the moon and that's a perfect exposure. It seems like it should be so easy, but it's not.
The digital chip or sensor, as well as film, just can't handle that kind of dynamic range with the moon so bright and the detail in the twilight scene or night scene so much darker.
Audri Lanford: So part of the answer then is he isn't doing anything wrong. It's that you really have to handle this as a special situation that you just described.
Jim Zuckerman: That's right.
In summary
To get a great picture of the moon by itself, photograph it as you would in the daytime. Take two separate pictures to compensate for lighting differences between the moon and a cityscape, by combining the cityscape with your picture of the moon using software like Photoshop or HDR software.
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