LLuna
How to Photograph the Moon
http://photographylife.com/how-to-photograph-moonTo photograph just the moon by itself, without any objects in the foreground, you will need a long telephoto lens like explained above to magnify the moon and try to fill as much of the frame as possible. Even with a good telephoto lens setup though, you will most likely be cropping the final image, simply because only a telescope would be able to provide enough magnification to fill the entire frame. With your telephoto lens mounted in your camera, secure it on a tripod and point at the moon. Make sure that your tripod is good and stable enough to accommodate and hold your lens and your camera. When it comes to shutter speed, aperture and ISO, here is what I recommend for general use:
- Camera Mode: Set your camera mode to full Manual Mode.
- ISO: Set your ISO to 100 if you have a Canon DSLR and to 200 if you have a Nikon DSLR (basically, whatever base ISO you have in your camera). For most other brands, the base ISO is also 100. If you have a point and shoot camera, see if you can find a menu setting to set your ISO to 100. Make sure “Auto ISO” is turned Off.
- Aperture: Set your aperture to f/11.
- Shutter Speed: Set your shutter speed to 1/125 on cameras with base ISO 100, and to 1/250 on Nikon DSLRs with base ISO 200.
- Lens Focus: Set your lens to manual focus (either through a switch on the lens or on the camera) and set your focus to infinity. Be careful while setting the focus to infinity, as some lenses allow focusing beyond infinity. On more advanced DSLRs such as Nikon D300, there is a handy feature called “live-view with contrast detect”, which can accurately acquire focus on distant objects. I have used it many times for my moon photography and it works great! If you do not have such a feature in your camera, then try setting your lens to the center of the infinity sign, then take a picture and see if it came out sharp by zooming in the rear LCD of the camera.
How to capture the color of the Moon
The "hard way"
is:
To
stack...!!
Stack and
stack and stack! doing it by hand is hard work and takes a lot of time,
but in 3 megapixel images it is the best way to do it, and mixing evenly
as many images you can you will reduce the noise to almost none and get
some color detail from the image you're processing. And after that you can
just apply the "easy way"(without the gaussian blur), and sharpen the
luminance channel a bit, as you have much color information and very
little noise, but I advise you to work in 16-bit/channel.
If you're
using a webcam to capture the images and a program like Registax to
process them, then your job is almost done, but you must process in color
and it is best if you save the file as a 16-bit TIFF. Then all you have to
do is to equalize the image and increase the saturation etc...
Advise in capturing
images for processing:
- Allways use a low ISO value
- Never use gain.
- Try to keep the moon in the midtones, never to bright or too dark.
- Use daylight white balance
- Do not use high compression in JPEG images
