Full Moon

Very nice indeed. Wait a few days and you'l catch all kinds of amazing details on the terminator.
 
Looks pretty good, excellent detail. I note your aperture of f/13. I don't know your lens or camera, but suspect you'd get more detail resolution at f/8, possibly even better at f/5.6.
 
chris malcolm said:
Looks pretty good, excellent detail. I note your aperture of f/13. I don't know your lens or camera, but suspect you'd get more detail resolution at f/8, possibly even better at f/5.6.
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Thanks for the tip Chris..... I'll try it. The lens has a value of f5-6.3 so I'm guessing I'll need to do f8 at full zoom? The aperture thing is still confusing me
 
You'll be able to do f/8 at any focal length.

It's worth waiting until half or gibbous phase before photographing the moon. Lots of people are attracted at first to the idea of shooting the full moon but as it is front lit there is very little detail. Wait a few days until it is more side-lit and you will pick up beautiful detail.
 
A good capture but have to agree with ghoti. The full moon looks very flat, when it is lit from the side you get great shadows from the ridges and the craters which makes the features stand out more.
 
ferg007 said:
Thanks for the tip Chris..... I'll try it. The lens has a value of f5-6.3 so I'm guessing I'll need to do f8 at full zoom? The aperture thing is still confusing me
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Generally speaking (there are a few exceptions) stopping down a lens from its maximum aperture will increase sharpness, detail, etc.. At the same time stopping down a lens will increase the amount of diffraction softening of the image. Diffraction occurs when light passes a sharp edge, in this case the edge of the aperture. As you stop down the proportion of edge to lens area inside the edge increases. So there will be some optimum aperture where the maximum detail is resolved, and stopping down further will soften the image due to increasing diffraction softening. Note that there are usually two optimum apertures, one being when the centre is sharpest, and the other, usually stopped down a bit more, when you get the best edge to edge sharpness. With the moon in the middle of your image it's probably only the central sharp one you're interested in. f/8 is a good guess, but it depends on your particualr camera and your very particular lens -- because different examples of the same lens vary. You just have to experiment.
 
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