This week’s photo serves two purposes, one is a short explanation of “how I did it” and the second is… well, it’s a moon shot, what’s not to like  🙂

Someone recently asked me how I got the moon with such detail, I had to have someone give me tips once, so its easy to pass along what I know, hopefully someone else can improve and even tell me other things 🙂

Shooting the moon.  First tip, use a tripod, it helps to have a stable camera when you’re doing this (most of my moon shots were without tripods though), The important bit is the metering, I use a spot metering mode.  I simply set the camera to spot metering, (my camera only uses the centre focus point for this), I use the centre focusing spot in the display, make sure that is centred on the moon, and half-press the shutter-button to focus, then recompose and click.  Really simple.

What the spot-metering does is meter the lighting for just the moon instead of trying to evaluate the lighting of the entire scene (in this case the whole sky)

Now normally we crop these images to show the moon in its full glory, well, I crop it since this is the whole image from my maximum zoom on the Tamron 18-270 lens.  I left this uncropped because I actually like it this way this time.

The moon is set against a dark sky (it was somewhat lighter before I processed), I look at it and think that it must be lonely up there, I’ll never fly into space like those great astronauts and cosmonauts, not fly to the upper atmospheres like jet-fighter pilots, but I still think that even after the initial moments of wonder and awe, it must be lonesome up there.  I am thankful for the family I have, the friends I have, the co-workers that I have (even those that have moved on).

If you’re ever feeling lonely, go out under the open sky, look at the moon and remember that under that same moon, there are billions of people, and somewhere there is someone who is thinking of you.

Because of the background colour (at the time of writing this) I suggest you click on the image for a better viewing at the Gallery  🙂