Waxing gibbous moon

Waxing gibbous moon

The moon casts a lot of light, even on its way out, as this "waxing gibbous" moon is. Ideally, when shooting the stars, there is a new moon (casting practically no light). But, the clouds don’t often cooperate and I shoot when I can, and that means I turn my back to the moon, and I ignore it.

One night, I decided to turn my attention here, though. When using spot metering, shooting the moon is pretty easy: meter on the moon, underexpose by about one EV, and shoot. A problem you’re likely to encounter is that if you don’t underexpose enough you’ll see a white glow around the moon (look closely and you can see a little brightness around the bottom right of this shot). Another problem you’ll encounter is that you can’t get close enough: this photo was shot at 200mm with a 1.4x teleconverter on a crop-sensor camera, for a 35mm-equivalent focal length of 420mm. The resulting uncropped image is what you see here. Maybe I’ll post a cropped shot next time!

See the original on Flickr.