Project 26- Shooting the Moon.

I was looking forward to this project for a while because its a subject I've never looked at that closely so didn't have any idea of what I'd be producing or how good the end results would turn out. The idea was to shot the moon within the landscape, sounds quiet easy first off but there are things that need to be considered before hand. First you need a telescopic lens because without one you're making life very difficult because unless you can catch the moon very near to the horizon you'd end up with this very light point (looking very small) in a huge black sky. For this project i used my 150-500mm lens that I'd normally use for wildlife but because of the size and weight the next problem to over come is supporting it enough so you get a good stable image, so a sturdy tripod is a must. Finally you have to be aware of the street/house lights around you if you're shooting in a built up area, I'd never realised how much light is sent into the sky until i tried this project its quiet amazing how much light pollution spoils the night sky.




The above shot i used a slightly longer exposure because i wanted to show the moon as a bright point illuminating the trees that it was moving across behind, by experiment i found that if i wanted to catch the details on the surface I'd need to use a much faster speed because what you don't realise to begin with is how bright the moon actually is.

1.

2.

3.

Over the course of time I've experiment with a few different way a shooting the moon but after doing some research online and in some astrophotography magazines i discovered a piece of software call Registax5. What you can do with this is take a number of shots of the moon in this instance and then stack them together to create a much sharper image because it helps to build up the surface detail.

Image 1 and 2 where just single shots that have be tweaked and sharpened using the software while 3 is five images stacked together to create a brilliant photo.

One thing i have noticed during this project is that although a full moon is good to shot you find that a moon with some shadow on the surface is a lot better because it picks out the details and the cont ores while the full moon seems very flat in contrast.

Above i gone a little further with the project by having my first attempt at shooting a long exposure (about 30mins) of the night sky. I seen this in lots of magazines before but have never thought of having a go myself, i love the trails the stars leave as they streak across the sky. I'd never thought about how much movement there is up there you just don't notice it, plus again as I've said earlier how much the lights from the streets and buildings around us hide much of the night sky. I'd love to go right off somewhere into the countryside away from any built up areas and try this again because i know the results would be spectacular.

This project has opened my eyes to a form of photography that I'd never really thought much about before and i shall defiantly continue to experiment with it in the future.