Moon Photography Tips

Moon Photography Tips for beginners is today's post in photography tips. Photographing the moon is an awesome and thrilling experience for any photographer . It's even more exciting if it is a full moon , super moon ,pink moon or any eclipses. Most of the moon captures, I took in the past were on my mobile as it is always handy .However quality pictures with details cannot be captured on a mobile or a point and shoot camera.

This week on April 7, was the "Pink Super moon". For those who are new to the term "super moon" , it is seen when the moon is a full moon and at the closest point to the earth in its 27 day orbit .This happens only once a year . Since this was also the first full moon in Spring, it is also called "Pink moon" , named after the pink flowers that bloom in early spring .

It was one of the rare sights of the moon this year and so I thought of trying my hand at capturing using the digital camera (DSLR) .Although one can always the auto mode or aperture priority mode , the manual mode is usually recommended.Sometimes ,the auto mode captures what appears to be a bright white image of the moon .However that can be recovered in post processing. Some of the tips I learnt for capturing the moon in the manual mode are listed below.

Tips for Moon Photography

• To follow the looney 11 rule . If the aperture is set to f/11 and ISO at 100 ,then set the shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO setting which would be 1/100 th second.Similarly if set to aperture f/11 and ISO 200, the shutter speed would be at 1/200 th second.
• Use a tripod if available to avoid any hand shakes .
• Use a long lens preferably greater than 200 mm and zoom as far as possible .
• For crisp and sharp pictures ,find the sweet spot of your lens f/11 to f/16 for sharpness.
• Set ISO to the lowest value say 100 ,to have minimum noise or grainy picture.
• Set the Shutter speed between 1/60 th to 1/125 th.
• Set focus to Manual focus (set to infinity).
• Capture the images in RAW so that you get images with maximum details. They can be recovered in post processing if needed.
• In post processing, play around with contrast and clarity sliders .The color temperatures can also be adjusted.
• Make sure you have a great spot to take your photographs without the glare of any street lights. A clear sky without any clouds is also essential to capture a good picture .

These pictures were taken just across my street and we did have street lights on and in the way . The sky also was a bit foggy with slight clouds . I captured a couple of auto and manual shots without the tripod .I think they came out decently all right for a first time try. There's lot of room to improvise with future captures. Hope you enjoyed reading this post and these pictures .Have a great weekend !