FZ7 shoots the moon

There have been some amazing moon shots here, mostly FZ30 and FZ50 plus a TCON17 or whatever. So I wanted to see what an FZ7 with just its (amazing) zoom lens could do. The moon doesn't nearly fill the frame, of couse, but still it's not bad. Here's a 593 x 445 pixel crop. Exposure was 1/125 at f/5.6 at ISO 100 - manual exposure, although spot metering agreed. The sky was not black yet when I took this, but it doesn't show except perhaps as a bit more noise in the sky. I didn't do any noise reduction. I did sharpen much of the moon's surface using unsharp mask in PSE4. By the way: all pictures were taken hand held. OIS is amazing.



One thing that's really impressive in the above image is the clean edge of the moon. I tried several different exposures and I found when I tried to make the moon "white" instead of gray then the camera produced a much blurrier edge with visible CA, I think. Here's the "don't do it this way" picture - exposure was 1/125 at f3.3 at ISO 100:



After I shot those two I shot the location, just because it was pretty, but it shows that the sky was not black. After sunset on the edge of a golf course (1/20 sec f/3.2, ISO 100)

Your first moon is really sharp. I like the way you framed your sunset sky in the last one.

Thank you very much for looking, and commenting. I'm glad you noticed the framing!

About sharpness: I shoot with in camera NR and sharpening set to "low". The ability to selectively sharpen areas and to play with unsharp mask settings in post processing lets me do better than the in camera processing, I believe. (It seems that's even more true for the Venus III engine cameras.) And that's fine with me; I don't expect the battery powered processor in the camera to, in a fraction of a second, do something as much to my liking as I can do in pp using PSE and a desktop computer. I did play with sharpening this image: selected the entire moon and sharpened it first, but saw that that accentuated artifacts along the edge. So I selected all the surface of the moon but not including the curved outer edge, and then played with unsharp mask until I thought it looked quite sharp, but not over the top. I think I used 0.6 pixel radius, and I don't remember the percent - probably in the 40 to 60% range, but I really don't remember. It made the detail "pop" nicely. I'm really glad you noticed it was sharp and didn't say "looks over sharpened."

Proves that there is really a ton of detail captured by the FZ7's lens. These crops are full size, we're pixel peeping here, and still it looks good.

Handheld you say. Not bad on #1 for hand held. As you say OIS is amazing.

Love the final shot as well.
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cheers
Rafael
Digital Newbie (FZ30)

JosephScha said:

JosephScha said:

Proves that there is really a ton of detail captured by the FZ7's

Click to expand...

lens. These crops are full size, we're pixel peeping here, and
still it looks good.

Click to expand...

Your #1 shot is very impressive. Thanks for the PSE4 tips - I'll try this.

I agree: The FZ7 has a great lens and captures fantastic detail.
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Frumious



http://frumious.smugmug.com/

Your number 3 is not sharp and blurred because you used the large aperture - f3.3. If you use f5.6 but slower shutter speed such as
1/60 or 1/30 iso 1/125, you will get the same sharp pic as your #1
but brighter i.e. more 'white' look as you wished.

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tony
http://www.pbase.com/twg

Very nice! es it's important to have an aperture of et least f5 and underexpose slightly to avoid excessive CA on moon shots. Good job of you and yr camera

I think you mean the #2 picture (of the moon). And, I doubt that if I used f/5.6 but lowered the shutter speed it would look any better. The effect of using wide f3.3 just isn't that severe, I think.

my two (moon) cents, FZ7 + TCON 17:

Aha, I guessed as much (on your thread). I'll say it again here, that's just magnificent. The distant trees in front of the moon are an amazing composition.

I think you have a point, I should not have doubted. I tried pictures of the moon last night at several different f stops and shutter speeds to maintain the same exposure, and f/5.6 is noticably better than f/3.3 or f/8.

That doesn't account for all the issues with the overexposed shot, it still appears even more blurred at the edge of the moon because it was overexposed. But the effect of using f/5.6 is more than I thought, I didn't really think I'd be able to see it.