Please give me some tips for night photography

Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6

10/28/2007 04:35:21 AM · #1

I tried to take pictures of the full moon for the first time but they have all turned out to be rather uninspiring. I tried it with both 50mm 1.8 and 18-55mm 4-5.6 lens and at different focal lengths and exposures but all of them are very low quality. Have i done something very wrong or is it the lens or is it both? Any tips to improve the pictures are most welcome.

Here are the three images that i took with a exposure bracketing of 1.

Message edited by author 2007-10-28 04:35:43.

10/28/2007 04:43:21 AM · #2

The "correct" exposure for the full moon itself is roughly f/16 at the reciprocal of the ISO, the same as the "correct" daylight exposure for scenics. Why? Because the moon, of course, is lit by daylight :-) So these shots of yours are overexposing the moon, big-time.

Of course, if you expose for the moon itself the clouds won't get anything... Which is why we tend to do moon shots, at least full moon shots, at or near moonrise or moonset, when there is enough sky and foreground detail to make an image.

And, finally, these lenses you are describing just aren't long enough to make the moon the subject of a shot; it's just a prop, so to speak...

R.

david_c

Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0L USM

10/28/2007 04:45:36 AM · #3

Get your f-stop as small as possible, manual focus/exposure is the key.

As Bear_Music just noted, your zoom is utterly insufficient to really capture the image you're after.

Message edited by author 2007-10-28 04:46:40.

10/28/2007 04:51:41 AM · #4

Originally posted by david_c:

Get your f-stop as small as possible, manual focus/exposure is the key.

Why? One thing about moon shots is that DOF is not an issue, LOL. You should be shooting at the aperture at which your lens performs best, which will be (depending on the lens) most likely f/8 or f/11. And the faster your shutter speed, the better, since the moon is of course moving.

Well, it is and it isn't LOL. The apparent motion of the moon across the night sky is a result of the earth's rotation of course, not the moon's movement, but same diff and it's easier to conceptualize...

ANY how: any exposure longer than a few seconds will produce noticeable movement blur on the moon under magnification, not to mention the beginnings of star trails if you are shooting stars.

R.

manish

Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6

10/28/2007 05:01:07 AM · #5

Thanks Robert and David for a quick feedback. These shots were taken almost after the sunset so its only the moon light on the sky. If i leave the moon aside , even the clouds and the areas around the moon looks very dull. I tried using long shutter speeds but then the areas around moon completely gets washed out. Is there a way i can try to capture the cloud formations as a primary composition and moon as just a part of the sky?

I have seen some pictures of the sky with the same lenses which are very sharp, crisp and nice

david_c

Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0L USM

10/28/2007 05:04:56 AM · #6

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

Why?

From personal experience (with my fixed-lens p&s, mind you) the smaller the aperture, the more precise the focus. It may be a different story for SLR lenses, especially ones that would match the focal length of my 12x zoom. I hope to get a chance to learn the answer, some day. ;-)

10/28/2007 05:15:45 AM · #7

Originally posted by david_c:

Originally posted by Bear_Music:
Why?

From personal experience (with my fixed-lens p&s, mind you) the smaller the aperture, the more precise the focus. It may be a different story for SLR lenses, especially ones that would match the focal length of my 12x zoom. I hope to get a chance to learn the answer, some day. ;-)

The problem is, as the physical size of the aperture (not the f/stop per se, but the physical diameter of the aperture) gets smaller and smaller, your each a point where the "circle of confusion" caused by refraction from the aperture blades results in images that get progressively LESS sharp as the aperture shrinks.

It's not something you'll notice on a 12x zoom at full extension though, because obviously the f/16 aperture size on a long tele is quite a bit bigger than the f/16 aperture size on a wide angle: f/stop is the ration of the physical diameter of the aperture to the focal length of the lens.

So a 25mm aperture on a 50mm lens is f/2, while a 25mm aperture on a 400mm lens is f/16...

Therefore, for moon shots at long tele lengths, stopping down is not much of a problem as far as sharpness goes. But even so, it's more a focus issue than anything else for you, I suspect; P&S focal mechanisms are not always that precise, and hand-focusing on an electronic viewfinder is problematic at best. This is one area where dSLRs have a distinct advantage; we are focusing the actual, projected image through he lens onto ground glass, and we can manually focus with considerable accuracy.

R.

Message edited by author 2007-10-28 05:16:07.