Shoot the Moon!!!

I tried to shoot the full moon last night but just ended up with a giant white ball on black background. I tried different setting, speeds, etc, and never could get the moon in focus. (it was in focus through the viewfinder)

Any good advice on how to shoot the moon tonight?

You could always start with the sunny 16 rule if the night is clear and the moon is indeed full.
F16 - 1/100 iso 100 That should get you very close on shot 1.

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Originally Posted by Marko

You could always start with the sunny 16 rule if the night is clear and the moon is indeed full.
F16 - 1/100 iso 100 That should get you very close on shot 1.

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OK, thats my problem, I set the ISO too high. I will try it again tonight.

It's a very common misconception that you need to shoot slow or with high ISo, low f-stop etc. Not true, a bright moon casts a heap of light.

Use a tripod though, the moon is actually moving ;)

If you have the setting on your camera use spot or center weighted metering. Also, use the longest glass you have. It is suprising how small the moon ends up looking in an image.

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Originally Posted by DanStar

If you have the setting on your camera use spot or center weighted metering. Also, use the longest glass you have. It is suprising how small the moon ends up looking in an image.

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I noticed how small the moon was even when using 300 zoom. Well, here it is, a little bland. Last night we had clouds, so there was a great sky. Tonight is clear as a bell.

This one was shot hand held, f16 1/100 100iso

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6092/...6239cf91_b.jpg

This one was shot tripod mounted, f16 1/80 100iso

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6098/...013e492b_b.jpg

Worked great except for not having to long of a lens for me.

Fairly decent results. Yeah, I always find it interesting how many people make this same error, myself included. We think, "it's dark" I must need to do a "night shot". But what we fail to clue into is that the moon is reflected sunlight! Photographing the moon is like photographing in the daytime.

Good results. Easy isn't it! :)

Good first efforts! Much better than mine :)

Your moon is almost BW anyway, so you might as well convert to BW to get rid of that green fringing you've got. You may also consider trying again with a partial moon, the side-lighting will emphasise all the crater rims. Plus crescent moons are more interesting :)

I find around 500mm is about right to get a useful sized moon (about 1000 pixels across). A decent mirror lens will cost 5% of the cost of a traditional 500mm lens, and give you results perhaps 75% as good. Don't know what camera you have, but Tamron made a fantastic 500mm mirror lens in their Adaptall-2 series in the 80s, you can pick them up for about £100 on ebay these days, and there are adapters available for almost all brands. I've got a moon photo with my Tamron 500 here which hopefully shows what the lens can do.