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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Who shoots the Moon ?





This is the first in a series of photo blogs that i am planning to publish here. The above picture was taken on Jan 30th 2007 from outside my balcony of my house in Denver,CO. When I Got a few minutes break before my 4 Hour Long Running Baseline Scenario load test, i decided to give this a shot. Taken with a Canon EOS Rebel Xti (EOS 400 D) . Aperture f4 at a focal length of 200 mm Manual Exposure for 1/400 sec.

It is impossible (at least for me) to get a decent shot of the moon with any of the automatic settings in the camera. Actually, this is a perfect example of where we need to go for the manual mode. The moon is against a black sky here and all the blackness in the sky will confuse the light meter in your camera. If you have a semi pro camera like the Canon
EOS 30 D and a long lens like 400 mm prime or a 100-400 then you could try the spot metering and get a good meter reading with the moon centered in the frame. This was not an option for me as I had a 400 D that does not have a spot meter.

Since I was dealing with high shutter speeds here, I did not need a tripod. Actually it is also a bit impractical for me to use a tripod leaning out of the balcony looking straight up to take this shot.

For this shot, I used the longest lens I had in my kit, the 70-200 4L. A longer lens or a 2x TC would have helped a lot in this case. So what i did here is, I deliberately underexposed the picture to capture the details on the moons surface. for this I went for a high shutter speed for 1/400 sec. After this I did a little bit of post processing in
Picasa to highlight the shadows. Shooting the moon is definitely something i want to keep trying and improve upon. I will be able to spend more time in the open in a couple of months So you can expect more in this series soon.
Until then - Happy Shooting
Arun
www.asasidh.com

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