I asked my online mentor, Michael Willems, a question that’s been bothering me for a while:
We’re having some lovely clear nights in Bangkok now it is the cool season. The moon often looks great but I have had limited success photographing it. Do you have any tips for good lunar photography?
He responded here with some useful tips.
The moon wasn’t very interesting tonight and it wasn’t full but I thought I’d try his suggestions.
I set up the Canon EOS-30D on a tripod with a cable release. My longest lens is the Canon 75-300mm F3.5-5.6 so I used that at 300mm.
I set the camera to 100 ASA to get the best quality from the sensor. I set a manual exposure of 1/125 at F11.
The moon was high in the sky so I got a crink in my neck trying to focus manually. It was not very bright so I tried some longer exposures.
I converted them to greyscale in Lightroom – the images looked better that way.
Here’s a single sheet with four pictures, courtesy of Lightroom’s “Print to File” feature:
Moon Shots
I also put some larger pictures on Flickr:
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3. 
4. 
My reaction? They are okay and better than I have achieved in the past. They don’t have the sharpness I was hoping for. I think that’s a function of my inexpensive consumer-grade lens. The camera is capable of better pictures.
Tags: moon
December 28, 2009 at 1:59 am |
Ah yes, that’s the *Thai* moon, it is darker than the Farang moon!
Seriously – a stop or two darker because it is low on the horizon maybe, and the sky is moist or smoggy? In which case another option is to leave the time at 1/125th, but change the aperture, say to f/5.6?
More! More!
December 28, 2009 at 9:35 pm |
Tonight the moon’s a bit fuller but vertically overhead at 9:30pm.
There’s an interesting comment on a photo I posted to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gb_in_th/4218632909/#comment72157622956132229
He recommended I sharpen the pictures in post. For these tests all I applied was Lightroom’s default print sharpening.
Franklin Wang lives, I think, near you. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/wang_funtime/ Do you know him?
January 7, 2010 at 10:20 am
Nope, don’t know him but he sure lives nearby.
December 29, 2009 at 5:50 pm |
[...] Bit Out of Focus By bkkphotographer Last night I made a second set of test shots of the Thai moon over Bangkok. This time I tried manually focusing on the moon with my Canon 75-300mm lens set at [...]
January 25, 2010 at 5:11 am |
Sadly and shockingly, I am told by his wife that Ian has passed away.