Photography Project: "The Moon"

One evening, after coming back from office, I was lazing and looking out of the window, when I saw the full moon rising. There was a cloud cover, and the sight was spectacular. I immediately got my camera and tripod, and started to shoot. For the first few shots, I noticed that I have been getting horrible camera shakes. I immediately figured out that it is my tripod and shutter assembly. I use a cheap Walmart brand tripod ($28 or so) which was not sturdy enough to support my heavy Alpha 300 camera and its 75-300 mm Zoom lens. The slight vibration I was getting from me pressing the shutter, was enough to blur out the photo at 300 mm Zoom. The tripod was not helping me either by damping out the vibrations.

I don't have a remote cable release, so I remembered a tip from one of the photographic books: (I don't remember the book, but I am thanking the author all the same, and I think will be a very useful tip to everyone who does not have a cable shutter release) I started to shoot with a 2 second self timer, so that the vibration arising from my pressing the shutter is dampened by the time the shutter opens. I got mixed results (curse my tripod which was not dampening the vibrations in 2 seconds). And finally I shot with a full 10 second self timer.

I ended up with 40 shots. (Including the ones with the camera shake). I tried various ISO and shutter speed combinations, keeping the aperature at F5.6 (Widest my lens has at 300 mm ). I was heavily biased towards ISO 100 though, being my favourite speed.

Finally the results I want to show. The first shot shows the moon riding the clouds. Buy prints from deviant Art



The moon was a ghostly galleon by ~Shubhrajit on deviantART

The second shot is similar, except shot at a slower shutter speed, so the cloud motions have blurred, giving it an impressionistic look.

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The third is a close up shot, with light reading on the moon, showing the terrains and textures on the moon. Heavily cropped so the size is small.

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Let me know what do you think?