To the Moon...

[Chromenut]

I so love my new camera!!! I've been basically taking lessons from all the wonderful suggestions here, and lately concentrating in night shots. Tonight, with nearly a full moon and no clouds in the sky, was my chance to take a few shots of the moon. I AM AMAZED! I mean you see stuff on TV about it, but I've never even seen it through a telescope, and yet my camera shows me craters!! If I'd had a better tripod (mine's too unstable) I'd have got some better shots and even closer.

So, being as I'm better at post-processing than the actual photography, I decided today I'd take a trip to the moon... hope you like what I've done. In all these, the moon is NOT touched up at all, no changes to it other than a resize or crop. I put it in as it came out of the camera. Still amazes me... My series is called "To The Moon" and I hope you like some of the fantasy/sci-fi I've added into a couple of these...

[Douglas]

Awesome shots, man. On the first one, I was going to ask how you got the stars in the shot too. But I see thats some PS for effect.

What settings did you end up using for these?

[Chromenut]

Originally Posted by Douglas

Awesome shots, man. On the first one, I was going to ask how you got the stars in the shot too. But I see thats some PS for effect.

What settings did you end up using for these?

The first and fourth I had some plugins that I used to create the effects of stars, gaseous clouds, other planets, etc. Just kind of fun to play with and produces some awesome spacey images.

As to my settings, I was using f5.6, and playing around with 1/800th up to 1/500th on the shutter, had the camera on a not very stable tripod with a 12 second delay on shutter open. Could have got better shots with a more stable tripod as it was a little windy. Had to play around with shutter speed as the moon was soooo bright that the settings I used at night normally would be way longer that these. Also they were shot at several focal lengths, starting at 100mm zoom, and that big one is at just shy of 300mm zoom. Obviously camera stability at these zoom levels is hyper-critical. I took some more with an additional 2x and 3x digital zoom on top of the 300mm, but the tripod moved just enough to blur the edges too much for the frames to be useable.

As to software, I use PSP X2 instead of PhotoShop, I've always enjoyed it's functionality over PS's.

EDIT - Pulled the EXiF data so I could give you accurate settings on these photos.

#1 = f5.6, 1/400th exposure time, 676mm focal length (@35mm), iso 400, no digital zoom
#2 = f5.6, 1/800th exposure time, 676mm focal length, ISO 400, 2.28:1 digital zoom
#3 = f5.6, 1/800th exposure time, 676 mm focal length, iso 400, 4.35:1 digital zoom
#4 = same settings as 1

[Chromenut]

Couple more from fooling around oday...