How do you shoot the moon?

[ConanD]

Not in hearts, in photography. Tonight, there was a gorgeous full moon rising over the woods on my property so I hauled out my D7100, tripod and my favorite 50mm prime to see if I could get a shot. The following represents the "best" of the lot. I was shining a flash light on the scenery for added light (which was a last ditch effort to very little effect). How do I get rid of the horrible star effect and have there be enough light to see the moon and at least a good, sharp outline of the trees -- or even better, to be able to see the snow on the ground, too.

 

[Shunda77]

Not in hearts, in photography. Tonight, there was a gorgeous full moon rising over the woods on my property so I hauled out my D7100, tripod and my favorite 50mm prime to see if I could get a shot. The following represents the "best" of the lot. I was shining a flash light on the scenery for added light (which was a last ditch effort to very little effect). How do I get rid of the horrible star effect and have there be enough light to see the moon and at least a good, sharp outline of the trees -- or even better, to be able to see the snow on the ground, too.

It's a tricky shot for sure, the moon represents your only light source so it becomes hard to expose the moon and the scenery correctly. Some people actually resort to stacked images to get the result they are after, and often this can get an effect closer to what was actually viewed in real time.

It will be interested to see what others suggest, because I'm getting keen on night scenery as well!

Good luck.

 

[gucio33]

Not in hearts, in photography. Tonight, there was a gorgeous full moon rising over the woods on my property so I hauled out my D7100, tripod and my favorite 50mm prime to see if I could get a shot. The following represents the "best" of the lot. I was shining a flash light on the scenery for added light (which was a last ditch effort to very little effect). How do I get rid of the horrible star effect and have there be enough light to see the moon and at least a good, sharp outline of the trees -- or even better, to be able to see the snow on the ground, too.

You don't shhot at f/18. Insted see where your lens is best and use that. Often around 4-5.6.

 

[Escape]

Have you tried playing around with HDR feature to see what you get?

 

[RedorBlack]

Treat it as if you are shooting during the daytime. The moon is an incredibly bright light source, so start underexposing and keep going until you have what you want. If you want the background as well, shoot for that and use layer masks or whatever your preference is to mix the images.

I go full manual, and play on a tripod until I have what I want for exposure of the moon. I also like stacking a bunch of images using Registax (freeware, takes some practice, google searching for how to use it well). If you are going for a foreground/background shot, registax is not as useful because the moon moves a lot more then you might think and the foreground is going to mess the stack up. So for that I'd just combine a properly exposed moon with a properly exposed foreground.

Try playing with D-lighting as well, but I don't think it can possibly compensate for the difference in the moon and the foreground.

Scott

 

[bakhtyar kurdi]

I shot it long time ago




Manitoba, Canada



Choosing the time is very important, you where too late at night.

 

[JerryShots]

The 'star' effect is an aspect of your lens, to fix that you might try another.
If you don't want to use HDR, or 'D-Lighting' just try to bring up the shadow slider in a program like Lightroom. Of course anything you boost will show more noise, so add some noise reduction.

Most cameras suffer from diffraction at smaller apertures, in a shot like this you really don't have that much detail to capture, so there is no penalty to closing it down.

What you want are shots like this:

Loading…

www.uncagethesoul.com

 

[bhushan912]

The "Star Effect" what you are calling is because of the smaller aperture of f18 you have used. You can use the maximum aperture your lens offers at that focal length (f5.6 i suppose in your case) and adjust shutter speed and ISO to keep the same exposure.

With this you won't these sunstars. But ofcourse moon will be still overexposed in order to keep all the background in proper exposure. You have to merge multiple exposures to get higher dynamic range keeping in everything properly exposed.

Regards,

Bhushan

 

[bhushan912]

I rather love these sunstars I liked this picture actually.

 

[ConanD]

I rather love these sunstars I liked this picture actually.

Thanks, but I really want to see some moon detail and not have it mistaken for the sun.

 

[ConanD]

The "Star Effect" what you are calling is because of the smaller aperture of f18 you have used. You can use the maximum aperture your lens offers at that focal length (f5.6 i suppose in your case) and adjust shutter speed and ISO to keep the same exposure.

With this you won't these sunstars. But ofcourse moon will be still overexposed in order to keep all the background in proper exposure. You have to merge multiple exposures to get higher dynamic range keeping in everything properly exposed.

Regards,

Bhushan

From looking around the web, it really does seem like what I'm attempting is not trivial. I'll give the multi-exposure/HDR/multi-image thing a go.

For everyone: Here were my thoughts as I was deciding how I would shoot this. Please let me know issues with any of these -- or even knowing what is correct might help

• I want a large depth-of-field because I want to capture as much detail as possible, so use a high F-stop. (this was under the assumption that would be able to see detail, which turned out to be totally wrong)
• I don't want to use a narrow focal length because I want to capture most of the landscape, not just the moon. But I don't want to go too wide because I don't want the moon to appear too small, so go with the 50mm prime (I was torn between that and the 35mm F1.8, but I thought the 35mm would be too wide and I've found the 50mm F1.8D to be my best IQ lens in terms of sharpness).

 

[BackroadsTraveler]

I think you've seen from most responses that some sort of image stacking or HDR will be required to get what you want IN MOST CASES.

However, there are other options.

If you just want an image of the moon, with some detail, you must shoot it with a fast shutter speed, which will leave the remainder of the frame black, but you can at least see the moon in detail. Here are two taken earlier this week which do exactly that.




About 4am local time




Setting over mountain ridge

For more detail of foreground, you can also monitor moonrise-moonset tables in order to find a moon rising or setting while there is sufficient daylight to capture the foreground. Here, exposure gets really tricky.

Where I live in the western US, the moon set is approaching early daylight, which should be ideal. This morning, the moon set just as the first light appeared in the east, and a good shot was not possible.

Here is one from several months ago.




Early morning moon set.

This is fun stuff to play with, but the most dramatic shots I've seen utilized some level of HDR.



--
BRT

 

[Tourlou]

OK, a few things.

- You need a long lens. Get an old REFLEX NIKKOR C 500 f/8 on e-bay or a MTO 3M-5CA or a MTO-11 if you've got strong arms or tripod!!!.

- Set the measure on SPOT and play with the compensation or go manual, which is almost always what works the best for me.

- Wait until the air stabilises. Turbulent air produces blurry pictures even if the focus is right.

- Shoot RAW. You will probably need post processing to get the best out of the shot.

Here are 2 shot, one with the Nikkor 500 C and another one with the MTO-11. The transfer produced terrible compression artifacts on the 500mm picture, but the moon itself looks OK.

 

[Escape]

[No message]

 

[Escape]

But he wants his landscape in the photo as well. If he uses a 500mm lens, he won't get much of it. Well, maybe if he catches the moon right as it's just above the horizon...

 

[Tourlou]

You're right, I didn't read to the end!

Variable density filter (if the moon is high enough) , 14 bits RAW + Post Processing, manual exposure.

This is more what the poster looks after!

 

[JeffryZ]

The problem is that there is such a difference between the brightness of the moon and the scenery at night. In the pictures above which show the moon visible with scenery note that they are taken daytime (or just before things got dark). The moon is a directly sun-lit object so with the old f/16 rule for manual exposure (set shutter speed to one over the ISO and adjust f/ stop based on light- a sunlit object should be f/16) you need f/16 and at ISO 100 for proper exposure while the night scene needs probably f/2 or lower (f/4 is used for shadows). It is impossible to expose properly for both in one shot. Try to catch it earlier when there is more light on the scenery or expose more for the scenery and don't worry as much about the moon blowing out. It was the moon- lit landscape which was visually interesting.

 

[phipop]

I just dont shoot the moon.

It's allright like that.

 

[starman1969]

I rather love these sunstars I liked this picture actually.

Thanks, but I really want to see some moon detail and not have it mistaken for the sun.

The only way you could get the detail on the moon her is to do two exposures. One for the moon, then one much longer exposure for the landscape. Use photoshop to paste in the correctly exposed moon to the correctly exposed landscape shot.

Another easier way is to only shoot the moon and landscape when the exposure needed to get both of an even exposure is to shoot as dusk approaches.

 

[draacor]

I rather love these sunstars I liked this picture actually.

Thanks, but I really want to see some moon detail and not have it mistaken for the sun.

The only way you could get the detail on the moon her is to do two exposures. One for the moon, then one much longer exposure for the landscape. Use photoshop to paste in the correctly exposed moon to the correctly exposed landscape shot.

Another easier way is to only shoot the moon and landscape when the exposure needed to get both of an even exposure is to shoot as dusk approaches.