Perfect Angle Photography

Since a couple of people have requested this, here’s the Stop Shooting Auto! lesson in shooting the moon.
Back in the olden days, when cameras were carved out of stone and didn’t have whizbang light meters and dozens of confusing exposure dials, photographers had to choose their settings manually. In fact, my first 35mm camera, a Kodak Pony IV, had printed inserts that went into a slot in the back of the camera to help you pick your settings. For bright sunlight you used this, for cloudy bright you used that, etc. And horror of horrors, there was no Photoshop– if you screwed up the exposure, you had to try to fix it in a (gasp) darkroom. And that was if you were lucky– most people just lived with whatever bad photos they took.
Back in these dark, dark days, photographers often relied on rules of thumb to help them choose their exposures. The most common of these was called the Sunny f/16 Rule. The rule went like this: for objects that are brightly lit by the sun, set your aperture to f/16. Set your shutter speed to 1/ISO of the film. (Film? Do you remember that?) So if you were shooting with ISO 100 film, you’d set the camera to f/16 and 1/100 sec, or as close to that as you could get. At ISO 200, it was f/16 and 1/200 sec.
I know what you’re thinking. That’s great, Patti. Thanks for your little stroll down memory lane, but someone has been spiking your Geritol. I want to photograph the moon, and I want to do it at night when it’s dark out. Why would I care about sunny days?
Here’s a little secret. The moon is nothing more than a bright object lit by the sun. Sure, it’s in a dark sky and everything around you is dark, but the moon is surprisingly bright. However, it’s also pretty far away, and that makes it look pretty small in the sky and even smaller through your camera’s lens. Unless you have a very long telephoto lens, your camera’s meter just won’t know what to do with the shot. If you’ve tried to take a picture of the moon in automatic mode, you probably got a small white dot on a dark but washed-out background. We can fix that, but it will mean putting your camera in manual mode. I hope that’s not as scary to you as it would have been before you started reading this blog.
Let’s go back to that telephoto lens thing for a moment. The first thing you want is the longest telephoto lens you can get, so that the moon looks like something other than a white dot. 200mm is about the shortest, 300mm is better, and 500+ is even better than that. If you don’t have a long lens, a teleconverter is a useful accessory to have. In a nutshell, a teleconverter is kind of like a magnifying glass added to your lens. With a 1.4x teleconverter, a 200mm lens acts like a 280mm lens, and with a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm lens acts like a 400mm lens. There are some serious downsides to using teleconverters, but they can also be useful tools.