Who hasn’t been inspired at some point or other to pick up a camera and shoot photos of the moon? Yet how often have you been disappointed by the photos you bring home? Plenty of times, I’m guessing. At least that’s my impression from the letters I’ve been receiving from readers asking for help. No surprise there. Photographing the moon is tricky, in part because it’s much brighter than you might think. Your camera’s meter can be thrown off by that light, and the resulting photo ends up badly exposed. And then there’s focal length and ISO to determine. If you choose badly, the moon will be little more than a tiny bright dot in the sky, or it can become an over-bright, featureless blob. Don’t give up! This brief guide to using a digital camera to shoot the moon should help you get started, and we’ll begin with…

 
Sensitivity Settings If you set your camera’s ISO (or sensitivity) as low as it will go—generally in the 100-200 range for digicams—the resulting images will be clearer and less prone to “noise.” This is particularly true of the darker parts of the photo. Here’s what noise looks like:

 

 
This is a one-to-one reproduction of the rising moon after dusk, cropped from the original picture. I hand-held my point-and-shoot (aka PAS) Canon PowerShot A550 and extended the lens to the maximum telephoto, then went further to employ the digital zoom. Note how the sky is not a clear shade of blue, but instead is grainy. The ISO is fairly high at 400, but there are other reasons for the graininess. Don’t use digital zoom. Stick with optical zoom for better quality telephoto images. And that brings me to a discussion of…

 
Cameras and Lenses Consumer grade PAS digital cameras can take surprisingly good moon photos, but your photos will be more consistently better with a sharp telephoto mounted to a digital SLR (or DSLR). Still, there’s no reason not to try and shoot photos of the moon with a PAS. Here’s the same moon photo in its entirety, reduced to fit the page and post-processed slightly to bring out its best qualities:

 

 
A pleasing composition, with beautiful colors that capture what I saw in nature, and only slightly tweaked to improve sharpness. At this magnification, the noise is less noticeable, too. Now let’s look at another moon photo shot with a PAS digicam:

 

 
Kayaker Bob Angel hand-held his PAS to shoot this photo (from his boat) of the moonrise at dusk on Lake Monticello, South Carolina. The moon’s brilliance is reflected in the water, the composition is good, and a hint of rosy blush accents the blue sky. A peaceful scene well captured. That takes us to saying something about…

 
Moon Shots During the Day The moon can be just as beautiful during the day as at night, but it’s often only faintly visible. Though it can be glaringly bright at night, daytime light is strong enough to considerably diminish the moon’s clarity. Bring out its character by using a polarizing filter to deepen the color of the sky and reveal details of the moon’s surface. Here’s a shot of the moon in its third quarter as it rises high on a February afternoon:

 

 
I used my DSLR and 200mm telephoto lens set at full extension to grab this view of the moon through the bare limbs of the trees. With a polarizer I was able to darken the sky and bring out the moon’s topography. Sometimes you can achieve this with post-processing, too, by diminishing the brightness of the photo and increasing contrast.

Another way to improve moon photos is to bracket the exposure. Set your camera to shoot manually, select the shutter speed you want, and then set the aperture so that you underexpose and overexpose in half-stop intervals until you have shots ranging from +1.5 EV to -1.5 EV. Later, when you’ve downloaded the pictures to your computer, showcase the photo which looks best. Here’s a shot of the moon setting at dusk in July:

 

 
I hand-held my DSLR with the telephoto, no polarizer, and underexposed one stop (-1.0 EV). The picture needed no post-processing except cropping. Hand-held photos are possible even when taking…

 
Moon Shots at Night I waited a little longer until the sky was darker and shot the moon again that same evening:

 

 
I only needed to sharpen the final picture very slightly, and cropped it so that the moon could be published online at close to one-to-one reproduction. Pretty, isn’t it? Again, I underexposed so that the moon’s brightness wouldn’t overwhelm the photo and wash out all the surface details. If you went by your camera’s sensor and used automatic mode, however, you’re more likely to get something like this, especially when the moon is full or nearly so:

 

 
I used the longest telephoto setting on my PAS and let the camera choose the exposure. Beautiful color, but the moon has lost all its definition and the trees in the foreground are hazy shadows. The moon is blurry for another reason, too, and that’s because I didn’t…

 
Keep it Steady Use a tripod, employ a cable or remote shutter release or timed release, and lock the mirror up (or use the B setting) to improve the chances of getting sharp photos. A slight shake when shooting, especially at slow shutter speeds, will result in a bad case of the blurs. I used a tripod to experiment with moon and star shots one velvety dark night, and was sure I’d get some terrific pictures. Instead I got many that looked like this:

 

 
This photo is very much overexposed, but the doubled moon is the result of something I didn’t anticipate—I set the camera to B (or Bulb) and stepped back when waiting for the timer to release the shutter. By not covering the viewfinder with my shadow, the moon was reflected. When I realized what was happening, I cupped my hand over the viewfinder and got better photos without the reflection. But there was something else that’s worth mentioning. The moon moves. Of course it does! But it moves faster than you think. I tried long exposures with the aperture closed tight in an attempt to capture a nearby bright star. This is what I got:

 

 
A blurry moon. The star didn’t appear, either. I didn’t have a long enough exposure to burn the star, but it was too long an exposure for the moon—it had moved. Something else to beware of is lens flare, which can be distracting and even ruinous. Centering the moon in your viewfinder should reduce the possibility of flare. In this view of the moon on a hazy night, I hadn’t centered the moon (I’ve cropped the photo to remove much of the dark boundary):

 

 
See it? The photo would have been better without the green and pink flares.

 
One last thing we should look at briefly is…

 
Focal Length A long telephoto lens makes the moon appear bigger in relation to the landscape. A normal (digital) lens of about 35mm just doesn’t capture the moon’s gravitas in the same way, and a wide-angle lens nearly makes the moon disappear as a dot in the landscape. Can you see it in the photo below?

 

 
Squint and you might make out the moon in the upper right corner of this photo, shot in late morning on a bright day with my hand-held PAS at about a 50mm focal length.

 
A waxing crescent moon will soon be visible. In a couple weeks the moon will be full. Autumn has arrived, and this is a good time to begin looking for opportunities to shoot the moon. Practice makes perfect!

 
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