Shooting the Moon…

I added a little text in Photoshop to make it look more official.

So you want to shoot the moon? Keep your pants on, not THAT kind of shooting the moon.

It’s tough to photograph the moon at night, right? Night photography is the hardest, right? Nope. Think about it like this. The light you see on the moon is from THE SUN! There is an old photography class lesson called the “Sunny 16 Rule” where you set the camera’s shutter speed at the reciprocal of the film speed and the aperture to f/16. Easy right? Let me explain in more modern terms. You’re not shooting at night. The moon is in daylight, so in MANUAL MODE set a low-ish ISO like ISO200, then a shutter speed close to that same number like 1/250 and an aperture around f/16. Shoot at these settings. Now change the aperture a couple of times in either direction to get a few different exposures to work with in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, or your favorite editing software. Keep the shutter speed at that 1/250 especially if you’re using a longer lens. Using a tripod helps, WITH a cable release, just be sure to check your camera’s instructions to see if you need to turn OFF any image stabilization in the camera and/or lens. If you don’t have a cable release, use the camera’s built-in self-timer usually found in the DRIVE options.

Now get out there and shoot the moon.

I should add here that most photographers have their own process and tweaks for doing this. I’m certainly not an expert. This shot was taken with a Canon R5 at 1/250th of a second at f/16, ISO400 in manual metering mode.