How to Photograph the Moon Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

let's take a picture of about you don't
actually need any fancy gear you really
don't even need a tripod it's helpful
for some things just going to zoom all
the way in and this is my kit lens goes
to 135 autofocus on the moon and take a
shot
now with the default settings which
you'll see is probably a completely
blown out bright glowing kind of sphere
and that's because your camera tries to
auto expose the whole scene so it looks
at all the black night sky and then sees
just one white dot and it tries to make
that black kind of grey so it's going to
over expose the most important part of
the picture so this is one of those
times where you really need to put your
camera in manual so I'll put the camera
into manual mode and I'll set the
shutter speed to one sixtieth if you
have image stabilization on your lens
that should be fine and I'll set the
f-stop to f/8 now for the ISO I'm going
to choose my camera's base ISO this
camera has a base ISO of 100 so I'm at
one sixtieth f/8 and ISO 100 we'll take
another picture of the moon and that
looks much better because now I can see
all the little detail of the moon no
part of the moon is overexposed and
that's what you want to look for you
want to make sure that no part of the
histogram is touching the right side you
can always make it brighter or darker
and post so long as you capture
everything and that's actually all you
need to do though I will give you some
more advanced tips in just a second the
rest of getting a good moon shot is
really about planning you want to wait
for a night when you have really clear
skies and in fact a cold night like
tonight with low humidity is way better
because no matter what kind of lens you
have the atmosphere is going to make
your picture much softer and if it's
warm and if it's humid well all that
humidity is going to move your light
rays around a little bit and make your
picture less soft if you're at a high
altitude of course that helps but you
don't have to be you also don't have to
be out in the middle of nowhere I'm just
in a neighborhood
at pretty close to sea level and I can
get pretty good pictures of the moon now
you're never going to get a telephoto
shot of the moon in a landscape you just
use it's kind of impossible to focus on
the landscape and get it nice and sharp
and to focus on the moon and get it nice
and sharp because the moon is really far
away so what happens is either you can
shoot very wide angle in which case the
moon will appear to be a tiny tiny spot
or if you shoot telephoto either the
landscape or the moon is going to be way
out of focus
all those landscape pictures where the
moon is big and huge they're probably
faked in Photoshop and and that's okay
because it it can more accurately
represent the way your eye sees it
because sometimes the moon actually
looks huge especially when it's near the
horizon but it's actually not that big
in your camera I'll show you how to take
that picture we just took and Photoshop
it into a landscape picture it's really
easy first open the two pictures as
layers in Photoshop with the moon
picture on top set the moon's layer mode
to screen
then use free transform while holding
down the shift-key to adjust the size of
the moon
lower the opacity of bed maybe to 90%
drop it in place and you're done
of course you can get even better
pictures with more telephoto lens I'll
switch from 135 millimeters to a full
400 millimeters this is my image
stabilized 100 to 400 so zoom in all the
way to 400 millimeters and take another
shot that time I took several shots and
I'll do that anytime I'm taking a
challenging photo because now I can go
back into Photoshop and flip through all
of them and pick the very sharpest one
and I bet if you take ten pictures they
won't all be exactly the same sharpness
because I'll just use this technique
anytime I have a challenging photo also
breathe kind of slowly since I am
hand-holding it now as long as you're
taking multiple shots go ahead and take
more than ten take twenty or a hundred
shots because when you get a lot of
shots like that just go through and pick
out the sharp ones but you can then
combine them in post-processing to get a
picture that is mine numbing Li sharp
that has just intense amounts of detail
that you've probably never ever seen
with the naked eye so let's take a look
at how to do that with software first
I'll look at every image at four to one
and delete any pictures that aren't
razor sharp
if you're using Lightroom export all the
sharp pictures as high-quality JPEG
files to a new folder visit scp-1000
slash ready stacks to install register
acts and make sure you get the latest
six point one point zero point eight
update if you're using mac visit st p io
slash read a stack smack and follow the
instructions it's a freeware tool and
it's a few years old and it's primarily
designed for astronomy nerds so the user
interface might not be as refined as
other apps you used but it's the best
app i've found next launch regista x
click select to choose all the sharp
moon pictures by clicking the first
picture and then shift clicking the last
picture the first time you do this you
might want to select a smaller number of
pictures like ten so that it's faster
and more reliable
now click set aligned points align and
limit to process the pictures with their
default settings basically click the
button with the green line under it the
set a line points page finds landmarks
on the picture that the software can use
to line up the different images even if
you used a tripod the moon moves around
the earth so the images won't be lined
up the aligned page performs the actual
alignment and it often fails if it does
fail try selecting fewer pictures the
limit page removes lower quality
pictures such as pictures with motion
blur it often fails for me too which is
why I recommend sorting through all your
pictures manually beforehand now click
the stack button this lines up your
pictures if it prompts you to optimize
your cores just click yes this is where
the magic happens the wavelet page you
need to select a scheme to sharpen the
stacked images no one scheme will work
for all images but you can use my
starting point for moon pictures by
clicking the load scheme button and then
typing HTTP colon slash slash SDIO slash
moon scheme that will automatically
download and apply my moon scheme but
you can adjust the sliders to increase
or decrease the sharpening to speed
everything up reg astac only applies a
sharpening to a small part of the
picture to sharpen the entire image
click do all when you're happy with your
picture click save image that's it what
if you try this and it doesn't work for
you sometimes registers won't align
properly or will simply freeze try
stacking fewer images or stacking a
different set of images from your
sequence here's the before and after
it's a remarkable difference isn't it
here's a sequence of stacked images I
created during our last lunar eclipse
each showing far more detail than I
could have seen with my eye or gotten
without stacking
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you