How to Shoot Moon

Moon Shot

Many of us are fascinated by moon, even though we stepped on it. We want to explore it whenever we look at it. Recently, I bought a digital SLR camera and decided shoot a picture of it while standing on Earth.

Things You'll Need

• A professional SLR camera
• A lens of least 300 mm
• Tripod stand
• Moon
• Clear sky

Instructions

How to Shoot Moon

1. Mount at least 300 mm lens on your SLR camera body.

2. Fix your SLR securely on a tripod stand with wide base. heavier the stand sharper the image; reason: even the slightest movement of the camera will reduce the acuity of the image since it is a distant object with low illumination. Sometimes the motion of the shutter will itself significantly distort the image.

3. set the camera at manual mode with following settings:
   Use RAW fine picture files.
   keep metering on matrix
   shutter speed of 1/320
   ISO at 100
   aperture f9
   exposure of -5 (or least available)
   Select 'vivid' or 'more vivid' picture quality
   Set white balance to 'auto'
   Use high tone and high sharpness features if available
   put saturation at enhanced option

4. Set up the self timer. Do not shoot manually, you will loose the sharpness and details of moon

5. Zoom out your lens to full 300 mm.

6. Start shooting, use auto focus initially, take some shots with manual focussing as well

7. At the end of the photo shoot review all your pictures in your camera first. Zoom in as much as you can. Delete the odd ones, there will be plenty of them. Select few best and ship them to your workshop, that is your PC.

8. use the software that came with your camera to process these RAW images for best results.

9. Play with these files in your computer until you get the best results. Here are the tips: Crop images, use low level sharpening, play with contrast and brightness etc.

Tips & Warnings

• Shoot on a clear night

• Shoot as many pictures as you can

• make tiny adjustments such as matrix, shutter speed, exposure ISO etc with each shot until you get the best

• use auto focus as well as manual focussing

• Do not shoot if sky is foggy. even though you may see the moon clearly but lack of absolute visibility is vital for auto focus to perform at its best.

• RAW files may loose details if processed in certain software, as for example I used picasa to process my Nikon RAW files and lost all the fine details that I was able to see in my Nikon cam LCD. Then I installed the Nikon CD and noticed the huge difference. Go with the software that came with your camera.