Trying to capture the moon

[topol]

Having read a few "How to's" about photographing the moon, [recommended on here]I decided my Fuji FinePix SL300 wouldn't be up to the job. Most of my efforts proved me to be right, but.........

The pic was taken at about 9pm - so not dark.
Focal length [full zoom} 129mm ,
Exposure Mode = auto bracket (2)
f20, ss 1/38, ISO 100 - the nearest my camera would get to the "How to" recommended settings.
At these settings the Exposure Indicator was showing totally underexposed - but what the hell........

Of all my attempts to "shoot the moon" this was the best I could achieve.
If anyone can suggest anything else I could try within the constraints of this camera, please post.

[chauncey]

Can we assume that you used a tripod? Try opening the lens a bit...f/8.

[Shadowman]

Hi Norm,

When you say Exposure Indicator do you mean the histogram? If so, that is typical for this type of capture. You'll find plenty of suggestions on this forum, just do a search for "moon photography" and you'll see quite the selection of member entries. Nice effort.

[topol]

Hi Norm,
When you say Exposure Indicator do you mean the histogram? [...]

No, my Exposure Indicator is a small slider bar that appears on screen when altering ss &/ or ap. settings.
It's centred by default and moves to right [overexposed] or left [underexposed] to show the affect of a setting alteration.

I've looked around at "moon photography" and I guess the vast majority of folk are using far more sophisticated cameras than mine.

No, I wasn't using a tripod as such - don't have one, but the camera was "supported" by attaching my table tripod, and using the top rung of my step ladder to take the weight.
[Heath Robinson - eat your heart out!]

I'll have to do better than that, methinks............

I'm making a note of all suggestions and will try again when conditions are right.

[Donald]

No, my Exposure Indicator is a small slider bar that appears on screen when altering ss &/ or ap. settings.
It's centred by default and moves to right [overexposed] or left [underexposed] to show the affect of a setting alteration.

I've looked around at "moon photography" and I guess the vast majority of folk are using far more sophisticated cameras than mine.

You've accurately diagnosed the issue as 'exposure'. I don't know your camera or how to set it up, but if you're taking your exposure reading from the surface of the moon, you need the wee needle in that bar over to the right. In the centre is no good. The moon is a very bright thing. So whilst you don't want to needle going off the scale, you need the bright bits bright. The the rest will look after itself.

I don't know what 'auto bracket (2)' means as an exposure mode, but I suspect that the camera is being left to make the decisions. Got to remember - cameras are fairly stupid things. They don't think ... like what you and I can do, most of the time. They're fine being left to get on with it for your bog-standard type of shot. But give them anything more testing and it's likely they'll make a mess of it. You need to look at your various exposure options and intervene to take control of the exposure much more than I think you are maybe doing.

[Manfred M]

Norm - the main problem with your exposure is your exposure meter. All cameras use a reflective meter (i.e. they measure the light reflecting from the subject), which means they are set up to assume you are shooting an "average" subject (I won't get into how that is defined).

The moment you subject is not "average", the meter fails to provide a proper reading. One sees the same issue when photographing at night or when I go out on a snowy day in the winter and my meter gives me an erroneous reading. As Donald has already mentioned, you need to increase your exposure slightly to correct this. As I don't know your camera, I don't know how you would override the light meter. My cameras have a button that lets me dial this in quickly and easily; so check your manual to see what is says. I would try +1 on the exposure to see what that does tor you.

The image is quite soft as well; an exposure of 1/38 is far too slow for a full zoom shot. Your aperture is far too small as well; I would be looking to shoot something like this at around f/4 or f/5.6 to improve your shutter speed. Likewise, you might wish to increase your ISO a bit as well, I don't know how your camera is for noise at higher ISO, so can't make a suggestion here, but 100 is what I do for daylight shooting.

And please, doing fall off the ladder...

[James G]

Hi Norm, I think your camera is up the job, it is more a question of getting the capture workflow optimised along with tweaking any pp.
See if this helps.....

1)Firstly, you absolutely need to use a tripod if possible

2)check your camera, if you have the option of mirror lock up activate it and allow a minimum of 5 secs for vibrations to reduce before releasing the shutter.

3) use a cable/remote release rather than press the shutter in any case, even if you don't have a mirror lockup.

4) as regards exposure etc experiment with the following settings as a starter and modify them as needed....
For 1/2 moon(F11, 1/60s, ISO 200) (F8, 1/160s, ISO 200)
For full moon (F11, 1/100, ISO 100)

5) If you camera can capture raw images do so rather than jpeg

I'd recommend taking 10 shots minimum (for pp stage)

As regards post processing, I use Photoshop CS6, which may not be helpful to you. ... but..

a) As I said above usually I take 10 frames capturing as raw, and load them into Photoshop (ACR)

b) I then process each image to correct white balance, increase/decrease exposure as needed, but adjust to get best contrast and vibrance. More importantly, I reduce noise as much as I can without losing image clarity.

c) having done this for each image, I then stack them as layers in Photoshop, align them and crop as needed.

d) I then inspect each image, placing those with the 'best' definition at the bottom of the stack, and then from the bottom up change the opacity (blend) so that the bottom image is at 100%, the one above at 50%, then the next up at 33% etc.
(For 10 images the sequence is 100,50,33,25,20 17, 14,12,11,10) This will 'remove' noise, .... without going into all the detail, 'noise' will not be present in the same place in each image and is 'lost' each layer is blended, Detail which is common to all the images is retained.
e) Any final processing (sharpening etc ), is the applied to a stamp copy of the stack.

[Manfred M]

2)check your camera, if you have the option of mirror lock up activate it and allow a minimum of 5 secs for vibrations to reduce before releasing the shutter.

3) use a cable/remote release rather than press the shutter in any case, even if you don't have a mirror lockup.

James - He's shooting a superzoom, not a DSLR, so no mirror to lock up needed or available. Generally this type of camera cannot use a cable release either.

[xpatUSA]

Wot everyone else said, plus:

If possible, google to find out the best f-number for your camera as regards the so-called 'sweet spot' between aberration at low f-numbers and diffraction at high f-numbers. Or, bracket between, say, f/4 and f/11.

Important note: f/20 will diffract the moon part of your image quite badly, especially if the moon is not filling the frame.

You might get slightly more acutance by:

1) Upping the local contrast - can be done with USM and a largish radius maybe 1.5 to 2.5 but a low amount maybe 7-11.

2) Using de-convolution sharpening - you might have to find an app that can do that, e.g.

ACR at high settings of the 'detail' slider
RawTherapee
Qimage?

Perfect de-convolution undoes diffraction blur, theoretically - but most apps use a Gaussian approximation and guessing the correct "radius" is neither easy nor intuitive.

If de-convolution sounds too daunting, try additional USM at 0.3px and a higher amount say 20-50, after doing the local contrast USM mentioned above.

[James G]

I'm not too well up on the Fuji range. That said, a few days ago I was looking at a video clip on U-Tube of Jupiter and its moons captured on a super-zoom camera. It's pretty amazing what the technology is capable of ...

[topol]

Whoah - where to start. My head hurts and it's not just the weather!

To save everyone time and effort, and with the greatest of respect - I’m not into PP other than the occasional tweak and / or crop.
To be honest, while I understand some folk live by it, I find it far too complicated, and at my age I don't feel inclined to try.
I say this with the greatest of respect and by no means wishing to be insulting nor frivolous.

James - He's shooting a superzoom, not a DSLR, so no mirror to lock up needed or available. Generally this type of camera cannot use a cable release either.

Quite so, and no cable release.


My main problem is not being able to set my camera to the settings recommended on some of the "How to's" I found on here.
My thread HERE goes some way to explaining the limitations of my camera in terms of combining shutter speeds with aperture, and to a lesser extent, setting the ISO.
[Some modes are set to Auto which can't be changed beyond a choice of 400 or 800].

Donald said: "I don't know what 'auto bracket (2)' means as an exposure mode"
This from my User Manual:

AE BKT
Each time the shutter-release button is pressed, the camera takes three shots:
one using the metered value for exposure, the second overexposed by the amount selected
and the third underexposed by the same amount
(the camera may not be able to use the selected bracketing increment if the amount of
over- or under-exposure exceeds the limits of the exposure metering system).

AE BKT EV STEPS
Choose the size of the exposure bracketing increment used when O (AE bracketing) is selected in
continuous shooting mode. Choose from increments of ± 1 / 3 EV, ± 2 / 3 EV, and ±1 EV
Hope that explains it.

I’ve taken note of all the suggestions made [for which-grateful thanks] and will try again when conditions allow.



In this image, steps 3 & 4, SS isn't an issue, but the aperture options seem to be dependent on how much zoom has been applied, and in each case there are no more than 3 options anyway.

[xpatUSA]

Whoah - where to start. My head hurts and it's not just the weather!

To save everyone time and effort, and with the greatest of respect - I’m not into PP other than the occasional tweak and / or crop.
To be honest, while I understand some folk live by it, I find it far too complicated, and at my age I don't feel inclined to try.

At 75, I feel your pain

I recall happily advising my younger (60+) brother to set a particular aperture on his point-and-shoot Panasonic camera and the major shock to my system when I learned that he couldn't! Glurk.

Anyway, do feel free to ignore much of what I wrote earlier. Having said that, shooting the moon would appear quite ambitious in your circumstances - so good luck with that.

[topol]

It's not a question of me ignoring your advice - more about which of it I can take advantage of, and what I can't.
My son, a semi-professional photographer, has the same trouble [with me], but getting usable advice from him is like getting blood from a stone.

Thanks anyway.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Norm,

I wouldn't bother bracketing for moon shots, however - do shoot plenty, some will come out better (sharper) than others, due to camera shake and/or AF (Auto-Focus) issues.

I'd suggest setting the camera to Manual exposure IF that's possible, then playing with the settings until a good result appears.
I got some decent results with f/5.9, 1/250s, ISO 400 (or 1/160 at ISO 200), these values may vary depending how bright the moon is in your area.

My experience of moon shooting (with a bridge camera a bit like yours) is that:

- the histogram never makes sense, even when the image looks like it should be predictable
- the meter is useless, ignore it, if you can't shoot manual with setting similar to above, fiddle about until you get good results (on LCD) by whatever means necessary
- do not over expose the moon, if you don't have manual control (only auto), use - EC (negative exposure compensation) to reduce exposure
- a full moon is not best; you get more crater detail along the shadow edge of a partial moon
- if your camera has image stabilisation, make sure it is on (if hand holding)
- with more appropriate settings, shooting handheld should be possible (e.g. widest aperture at the max focal length of zoom) but do try to keep still by bracing yourself against something

Good luck, Dave

[rachel]

My best moon photos have been with a Finepix Compact and a Finepix bridge (HS30).


Try for a day or two before the full moon as it rises, or try a day or two after the moon as it sets. That way it's still light enough to be able to see the rest of the image even when brightness of the moon is reduced enough to make out the detail on it.

I use the P setting with exposure at minimum and ISO 100. I usually use a tripod and the self timer to avoid wobbles. I make sure the picture is centred on the moon so that that is where the aurofocus goes.

There is absolutely no reason why you can't get a good moon photo with your camera! This one is from almost exactly a year ago, with the Finepix HS30

[rachel]

Alternatively, if you want JUST the moon in a dark sky and no scenery, sometimes the same method works (ie P setting) but sometimes the moon is just too bright and M with a fast speed is necessary as suggested above

This I think was also the Finepix HS30.

[topol]

Sitting in my living room this morning [does this make a difference?] and in Manual Mode selecting Dave's settings "f/5.9, 1/250s, ISO 400 (or 1/160 at ISO 200)", my Exposure Indicator [see earlier posts] is showing totally underexposed.

Manual and Aperture Priority modes allow me to select from the full range of ISO, but P and Shutter Priority modes only allow a choice of 400 or 800 on Auto.

This image taken last evening ISO 400, f 5.9, ss 1/400, Exposure bias -67/100EV, shutter priority.



I don't really feel that I'm getting anywhere

[Saorsa]

Why did you use -2/3 EV?

Regardless of the exposure, the edges look a bit ragged. This usually means atmospheric problems, a high thin layer of clouds or heat convection and humidity.

I used to get fairly good shots of the moon in Western Pennsylvania but don't even try down in Florida.

I just noticed, she is shooting in high dry Switzerland and and you are in low, moist, (currently) hot Oxfordshire. I think you will do much better in the winter.

[gregj1763]

Norm, I feel your pain mate. Taking lunar photo's is very frustrating.
Here is the best I have ever achieved and it's with a $2600.00 camera and lens combination.
For your interest here are my camera settings. Tripod and cable release goes without saying or timer if no cable release available.
The lens is a Sigma 150-500mm shooting in RAW plus a bit of Photoshop to tidy it up

[topol]

Why did you use -2/3 EV?

A suggestion from "elsewhere"...........
Thanks for your explanations, maybe I should wait for winter.