Shooting the Moon

If you are fortunate enough to have the Moon in the right location in your image, count your blessings and shoot it quick. You would be surprised at how fast the Moon crosses the sky. Typically it travels about its own diameter in distance across the sky in about two minutes.

When exposing the full moon, the first thing to consider is that the Moon is a lot brighter than one might think. Remember that on a sunny day here on earth, the average exposure for 100 ISO is 1/125 at f16. The Moon receives roughly around the same amount of sunlight. Therefore your exposure of the Moon is roughly around the same exposure as for daylight. However, you should allow for the phase of the moon you can see and how much haze of our atmosphere you are shooting through. The higher up in the sky, the less haze to shoot through. Alternatively a camera spot meter using a long lens may result in an accurate exposure.

fig n.9 Hazy Moon

It would do no harm to open up your exposures to say 1/125 sec. at f8 for a brighter image of the Moon. Detail of the Moon on a clear night will register quite well. Fig n.9 was taken at 1/60 sec. at f8. It's yellowish appearance is due to a hazy sky, the exposure also needed to be that bit longer.

Overexposing the Moon too much will just make it a white glow and using too slow a shutter speed will make it an oval shape. The combined rotation of the Earth and the Moon around it makes it very possible to get a blur of light instead of a nice sharp Moon, especially as already stated when using a telephoto lens to capture it.

Lens Choice - Using a standard 50mm lens (on 35mm film) the moon can appear quite small in the image. For a rough guide using 35mm film, you need 110mm of focal length per 1mm of moon on the negative. This will bring the Moon in closer and make it much bigger in the final image. Remember though the Moon is moving quite quickly and using a telephoto will exaggerate that movement.

Adding a Moon

As we have stated, it is difficult getting the moon in the right location for a night photo. However it is quite simple to add it to an image. Therefore it would be good to take a photo of the moom on its own. Then have it handy to add to an image later using a digital editing program. For more on this and everything about digital image editing, enroll in our Digital Imaging Course.