Shooting the Supermoon

The so-called 'supermoon' was incredibly clear last night, so as my wife was heading off to bed and Cinderella's carriage was turning back into a pumpkin, I decided to grab my camera, zoom lens and tripod and venture out into the garden.

I thought it was going to be pretty straight forward - after all, with my Sigma 50-500mm last time, it was simple. But not with a shorter zoom lens - a 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x extender, giving me a 280mm reach.

When I first set up, got the tripod in the right place, lens at the right angle and the moon in focus, a massive band of thick cloud strafed in front of the moon, completely blocking it from view, and I thought the photo shoot would come to an abrupt end, but thankfully the cloud was moving pretty quickly.

I knew I had to consider a few things:
1.) The moon is really far away and I have only 280mm to play with, so whack the resolution up as far as it can go (22-ish megapixels on the 5D Mk III).  I can crop later on to see the detail.
2.) I need maximum clarity, so high ISOs are a no-no.  ISO50, 100, 200 are fine.  Stay away from 3200...
3.) Lock the tripod everywhere.  If this camera and lens tip over on the concrete patio, I will actually cry.
4.) Use a lens hood to stop streetlight, erm, light getting into the lens and creating weird and wonderful effects.
5.) Use mirror lockup and the 2-second timer facility to minimise any shaking, which would blur the moon.

The issue with shooting the moon is exposure.  Camera sensors are in no way as sophisticated as our eyes, so it's incredibly difficult in extreme lighting circumstances to capture what your eyes see.  The sensors in cameras try to pull colours towards middle grey, meaning that cameras try to overexpose for black (turning them grey) and underexpose for white (turning them grey).

(With that in mind, consider for a second what it is like to shoot a wedding, when many grooms choose black suits and most brides choose white dresses.  Nightmare.)

So when I pointed the lens at a mainly black sky with a moon the size of a pea, the camera just wanted to overexpose the entire shot.  This means that I might as well have created a black image and put a round circle of white in it somewhere, as the moon just goes completely saturated with no detail at all.

The answer to this dilemma is pretty simple - you underexpose the shot by about 3-4 stops or more to bring out the detail in the moon.  Don't worry about the sky being underexposed - it's black to start with!

There was a nice effect when light cloud around the moon was being illuminated, but it was almost impossible to get the moon correctly exposed while showing these clouds (and they were moving pretty quickly too, so the 0.4" shutter speed just blurred them across the frame):

Summary:
1.) Ignore the camera's settings - it will give you a dark grey sky with a pure white moon.
2.) Underexpose by anywhere between 3 and 5 stops (or take a wild stab in the dark at the settings and go from there).
3.) Use a low ISO setting - high ISOs will prevent a really clear image.
4.) For stability, use a tripod, use the mirror lockup feature and set the 2-second timer.
5.) Set the camera to the highest resolution you have - then crop to see the detail.

1/60" at f/6.3, ISO50 at 280mm, cropped to a fraction of the original size

New Year's (Photography) Resolutions

Well, not really. Just a load of things I'd like to achieve in 2012, photographically.

I'm not really into resolutions - they are proven to fail - but apparently they do focus the mind a little bit more and make you more likely to achieve personal goals.

So I've decided to set myself some photographic goals for 2012:

1.) Take a picture of our son, Samuel, every day.

- I started this the day he was born and have posted a photo from every day of his life on Flickr (you'll need to be one of my Friends of Family members to see the photos from this set).  I intend to keep it going until 3rd December 2012 at the very least.

Samuel, taken from the set, SGR on Flickr (permission required to view pics of Samuel)

2.) Take more film

- Last year, for some reason, I decided to invest in medium format and bought a Mamiya 645 Pro TL on eBay.  It's a great piece of kit, but I've put one film through it and that's it (mainly because it's pretty expensive to develop medium format film).  I also bought a Canon EOS 1V-HS, their final 'analog' SLR, but again, I only used it for one film and the results were superb.  I want to use the cameras a bit more, even though with a child, it's simpler to use a digital camera and delete all the blurry ones.  I like a challenge...

- A friend of mine (Rumbers!) asked me why I wanted to buy film cameras when I had a state-of-the-art digital camera.  It's a good question.  The answer is: because I can.

3.) Carry on writing this blog

- Sure, I get about 6 people reading this blog each time I post something new, but it keeps my writing skills fresh.  Writing is part of what I do for a living and I enjoy it.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much.

4.) Learn more about Photoshop/Lightroom

- Photography is one (very important) part of producing a picture; processing the photos is another part, just as darkroom techniques once were.  I use the same techniques in Photoshop/Lightroom most of the time - I'd like to do something more snazzy.

5.) Print more photos

- My Mum likes looking at photos on a computer, but LOVES holding them in her hand and actually seeing them printed out.  So do I.  Whether it's in a photobook or on individually printed photographs, I want to make sure I print more often.

So - any photography resolutions from you six??