Photographing the Moon

Every now and then I find some subjects that are extremely difficult to capture on my digital camera. they are normally low light or strongly contrasting light. One subject I find hard is to photograph is the moon.

So far I have identified two causes
1) I only have 3X optical zoom and that is not really enough to get a reasonably image. I have used my full digital zoom (a further 3X and a bit)and steady the camera on a tripod.

using digital zoom (10X)

2) My autofocus gets very confused when I try to focus on a small light source in total darkness, (you can hear the lens moving in and out and see the image going in and out of focus in the VCD screen) So I have adopted the principal of manual forcus and setting that to infinity.

A surprise when using Night Scene Mode (and 4 second exposure)


Last night I also tried out The Night Scene Mode, which lets to open up to as long as possible ($ seconds seems the longest exposure I every get and the camera adjust the sensitivity (Effective ASA rating) to get an averag exposure. What astounded me was how far the moon moved in 4 seconds!

The moon rises over Lower Tarwin


Don't be discouraged by my attempts, I have seen lots of fine photos of the moon taken with digital cameras. The moral of this post is don't give up and keep experimenting.