Finally, after many tries, I managed to get a proper shot of the moon. Sure, I've seen pictures taken with the bigger brother (400mm) of my telephoto lens, handheld (Hail, Minolta Anti-Shake), but I've learned that -at least with the 300mm lens- there are a couple of things you'll need for great pictures:
- Great weather. Preferably cool weather, giving a crisp, bright sky. I didn't even bother to go outside on damp nights.
- Full moon. Much better than first and last quarter
- Tripod - in itself you can shoot reasonable pictures without it, but the tripod really makes everything a lot easier (see below)
- Spot-metering. Unless you want to go fully manual or bracket every single option. The moon is frightingly bright and anything else than spotmetering will overexpose badly. Metering is a lot easier with the tripod, since the camera is pointed to the light source all the time.
- Small aperture. It shouldn't matter, but an increased DOF helps to get the image sharper. Don't overdo it; f/36 makes the picture actually fuzzier.
- Low ISO. With the tripod there are no worries about long exposures. Not that you have to worry about exposure time a lot - this picture was shot with 1/250
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