Photographing the Moon

I wrote a post recently about my perfect evening. In the post I mentioned photographing the Moon. It’s not always straightforward to capture the Moon, so I thought a short post about camera settings might be of interest. This post is written for cameras with a full manual option.

Firstly, shutter speed. Generally, shutter speeds of less than about 1/(focal length of lens) seconds will need a tripod or other means of stabilising the camera. So a focal length of 100mm would probably need a tripod at around 1/100 seconds or slower. For photographing the Moon, somewhere to rest the camera is helpful, although not essential. I shot at 1/125 seconds using a focal length of 400mm (and thereby went against the guidance I offered above!) However, there are other settings which can accommodate the shutter speed.

Aperture controls how much light enters the camera. A wide aperture (small f number) will allow too much light in. This leads to loss of details on the Moon’s surface, and can create a ghost reflection of the Moon within the picture. On this occasion, photographing the Moon, I used an aperture of f/11.

Finally, ISO. This decides how sensitive the camera is to light. The higher the ISO number, the brighter the picture will be. Higher ISO does impact the picture quality though, with images becoming grainy at very high ISO settings. For my final Moon picture, I was able to use a low ISO of 100.

I set the focus to manual, and improvised a tripod by leaning on my car. A couple of final images are below; one focussed on the Moon, the other on foliage in front of me. Does anybody else see a dragon’s head in the second image?!

There is of course an element of trial and error in finding the settings which suit you and your camera. I hope this post offers a few starting points.