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How to Take Pictures of a Full Moon

When taking pictures of the full moon at night, there are few equipment and technical considerations that photographers need to be aware of. Shooting at night is a different environment than shooting during the day. When using automatic exposure settings, the camera will want to use an exposure that will create a picture which looks like a daytime picture. The resulting picture will be overexposed. Photographers need to purposely underexpose the picture to capture the dark sky.

Things You'll Need

Tripod

Instructions

- 1
  Attach your camera to a tripod and direct the lens towards the full moon. Turn the camera on and set the ISO (light sensitivity) to relatively low setting. A setting of 200 to 400 is good. You will be using a long exposure where the shutter will be open for an extended period of time. A high ISO will contribute to digital noise.
- 2
  Press the "Menu" button on the back of your camera and scroll through the menu's until you find "Long Exposure NR" -- the "NR" represents "noise reduction". This will further reduce the amount of digital noise in your pictures during extended exposures. If your camera does not have this feature, you may have to reduce noise by editing the picture on your computer afterward.
- 3
  Extend or attach a telephoto lens that will fill the viewfinder with as much of the moon as possible. The more moon you have in the viewfinder, the easier it will be to obtain an exposure that captures a dark sky and the detail of the moon.
- 4
  Turn the exposure mode dial to "M" for manual exposure. Look through the viewfinder position the moon in the middle of the viewfinder and press the shutter release half way down to activate the metering and autofocus systems. Turn the shutter speed dial and aperture dial to match the meter.
- 5
  Take a test picture. Review the picture in LCD screen on the back of the camera. If your viewfinder is mostly full of the moon, the picture may slight underexposed, and will appear a little dull. To compensate for this, overexpose your picture by a half stop. A stop is measure of exposure and is controlled by the shutter speed or aperture. To overexpose, you want to increase the amount of light coming into the camera, so you increase the shutter speed or the opening of the aperture. Take a second test picture. Once you are satisfied with the exposure and composition, take pictures of the full moon.

Photography