How to take a picture of the moon...

     This may sound silly but I discovered that it's not really that easy to take a photo of the moon where you'd be able to see the features on the surface of the moon (IMAGE 1).

IMAGE 1.  100% crop. Exif: 1/400s f/5.6 ISO800 250mm (400mm @ 1.6x lens crop factor)

     I was up until around 3 am this morning trying to get this picture.  I couldn't do it any earlier because it was too cloudy.  But at around 2:30 am, the clouds went away and I had my opportunity to shoot the moon.

     So out I  went, into my front yard toting my EOS 450D and 55-250 IS.  I set up my 450D in P mode, zoomed to 250 mm, pointed to the moon, focused, and released the shutter.  My camera opened the shutter and stayed open.  For a loooong time.  The resulting image was a big bright blur in a background of black.  Darn!  (Well, actually, I muttered a different 4 letter word...) So I figured that I needed a tripod to prevent camera shake and eliminate the blur.

     So in I went to get my tripod.  I mounted the camera on the tripod and set it up for the same shot (in P mode) and released the shutter.  Again, my reaction was, Darn!  The first thing I noticed was that the image was still blurred due to camera shake, but not as bad.  The other was that the image was just one big, bright spot with absolutely no discernible detail of the surface of the moon (IMAGE 2).  So I'm like, 'Hmmmm...'  (The song, 'Things that make you go hmmmm...' by C&C Music Factory started playing in my head).

IMAGE 2.  Over exposed moon.  No details visible.

     So even with the tripod, there was still blur inducing camera shake, and there was no detail.  I figured out that the camera shake was induced by my finger pressing and releasing the shutter.  So the solution to this was to set a 2 second delayed shutter release, a feature that the 450D has.  This was helpful as I did not have a remote control shutter release.  As a safeguard, I also enabled the mirror lock up function to eliminate any vibration caused by the mirror flipping up.  So that got the blur out of the way.  But that still left the details, or lack of, which I could not understand why.

     So I kind of cheated, and went back in to find a similar picture on the net.  I checked out the exif data and discovered that it was taken at 1/250s shutter speed.  And a light bulb lit up in my head.  It finally struck me that in P mode, the camera automatically wanted to leave the shutter open for long enough so that enough light got in for a well lit photo.  In this case, enough light would be too much light, which was why the image of the moon became a big blotch of whitish yellow.

     So I went back out and redid the shot, this time engaging Tv mode, or shutter priority.  I tried various shutter speeds between 1/250s to 1/400s.  I still engaged mirror lock up and the 2 second delayed auto shutter release to prevent blur.  The camera handled the rest.  And the result is the photo you see at the beginning of this post.

     I finally had a satisfactory image of the moon.  I suppose I could have spent a bit more time trying different settings to get an even better image, but I was happy with the one that I got.  I finally decided to turn in to bed at close to 4 am this morning, with a smile on my face...