THE FULL MOON was sitting temptingly over the wood but at first I couldn’t get the settings right to photograph it with the 30x zoom on my new camera.
Faced with so much dark sky the camera’s natural inclination is to go for an average exposure, making moonlit clouds visible but in the process making the moon look as bright as the sun. The camera went for a 5 second exposure so, even though I had it on a small tripod on my desk, there’s a lot of camera shake.
Manual Setting
I set the mode dial, which so far has almost always been on ‘SR AUTO’ (scene recognition), to M for manual and went for the shortest exposure that I could select, 1/800th of a second.
I’m going to have to try again because this is underexposed but at least by tweaking the tonal levels in Photoshop I can bring out some of the details.
Camera Shake
To eliminate camera shake I set the auto timer to 2 seconds so that the camera had time to settle after the slight movement caused by my finger pressing the shutter button.
If I’d been drawing this full moon from memory I would have made it slightly yellowish but the camera’s auto white balance has shown it as almost pure grayscale, which is much nearer to its true, almost monochromatic, colours.