I've had my new camera for over a year now and still don't know how to use most of the features on the darned thing. Today I was inspired to try something new - play with the exposure control. One of the problems with photographing the Moon is that it's so
bright - even at its crescent phases, the brightness washes out a lot of detail. I've been getting around that by using a high shutter speed feature, which takes a burst of images of very short exposure time at a much lower resolution than normal. I wondered if, by using the exposure control I could get high-resolution images that also had more detail than my usual images.
My first attempt was taken at 8:06 PM, shortly after sunset. The sky was still fairly bright. I cranked the exposure control all the way down to -2.0, and did some processing to the resulting image - brightness and contrast adjustments and unsharp masking. I was very happy with the result.
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| Waxing gibbous, April 28, 2015, 8:06 PM. |
I wanted to see what would happen when the sky was fully dark, so I took another photo at 9:26 PM. With this one I only applied unsharp masking; any attempts to adjust brightness or contrast resulted in undesirable results. The processed image has less contrast in the maria, but shows more detail along the terminator.
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| Waxing gibbous, April 28, 2015, 9:26 PM. |
I'm glad that I tried this trick, and look forward to testing its effectiveness at other phases. Maybe I should go through the whole manual sometime...
