The Moon

So after an extended break from blogging, and some pushing from my supervisor, I decided it was time for another post up in here. Earlier this year, Monique (whom I shall affectionately refer to as "the girlfriend") told me about a great deal one of her colleagues had for me. A whole SLR camera bundle, with 5 lenses, and a flash gun (external flash). The girlfriend, who is also an avid photographer (and who does a lot of it for the magazine she writes for) convinced me of the deal's worth, and that I would enjoy photography. Since then, I have learn't a thing or two about photography, and I decided it would make great subject matter for my blog. So today I bring you: The Moon.

A few nights before the last full moon, we got home late one night, and I saw this magnificent sight in the sky: A 3/4 full moon, in clear sky. I decided to try capture it, and this is the result.

It may be of interest to some exactly how I captured this level of detail. I was especially surprised to see the small craters near the day night line. To do this, all I did was hook my 300mm telephoto lens (which on my camera is equivalent to a 480mm), stuck the camera on to a tripod, and pointed it at the moon. I toyed with aperture and exposure settings until one worked. I settled on 1/15s and f/16. A smallish aperture exposed over some time gave me this. As a rule of thumb, a smaller aperture gives you a sharper image. Unfortunately, a bit of blur came in when I enlarged the image, due to a bit of camera shake which occurred when I pressed the button. Camera shake is emphasised at this level of zoom. I have some suggestions on how to make the next attempt better. However, the clouds rolled in a few second after I got this shot, and so I settled on this. I also cropped the photo, with the notable crater ~ midway along the day night line as a focus. Apparently, one's eye is drawn to one of 4 points on an image. I may try an experiment in future to see how true this is.

My idea for this blog is to post more photos in future, with maybe a small write up about how I took them. Photography is my new hobby and I am quite excited about it, and so I have been researching how to make mine better. So some of the details may be a bit technical, but I will also try to capture some kind of story in the posts too. I have a large backlog of cool images to put up here, and I will slowly work through them. Let me know in the comments if this sounds like a cool idea.