p.1 #1 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
(I'm not sure where to put this item - none of the forum topics seemed to match ...)
Surprising, but you can do this, handheld, with the right equipment. First of all, I haven't got the Hubble space telescope, so there are some limitations. You won't see any old lunar landers, but features like mountains, craters, the mare etc will show up quite nicely.
I did this with a brand new Canon EOS 7d, and a used EF 100-400 IS L. You will also need the following:
A nice clear night
A moon that isn't full (A full moon has no contrast and no shadows, so is pretty boring). Tonight, it's gibbous (i.e. a bit over half).
Preferably not too cold. Image stabilisation can't cope with too much shivering.
A garden seat. Yes, you need to sit comfortably, because you are going to challenge that image stabilisation quite a bit. You do need a good steady hand as well.
First of all, you need to understand that the moon is a very bright object. The automatic exposure on the camera will overexpose it and you won't see anything except a white disk. You need to set maximum negative (minus 5 on this camera) exposure compensation (don't forget to reset it afterwards). Choose ISO 200.
Ensure that image stab is on.
Extend the zoom to 400 - you want it as big as possible, and set the aperture to 5.6 - the maximum (don't worry about depth of field. With a subject 200,000 plus miles away it doesn't matter!)
Make sure that you are comfortably seated and brace your arms holding the camera against your body (OK you can wuss out and use a tripod, but I managed). The shutter speed should be about 200. Any less that this and it won't work - you will get camera shake (unless you use that tripod, mirror lock-up, remote release and all that palaver).
Take some shots. Use raw.
In DPP, sharpen the image and perhaps reduce the brightness a little further. Crop heavily (you are going to make those 18 megapixels work for their living here). Save as jpg (surprisingly small files - remember the moon is essentially monochrome and you cropped them heavily. My results are on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandstuart/
Ok I'm not that good, but can anyone else do better?
p.1 #3 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
Thanks for your comment.
I added another attempt - a mad re-edit of the second shot where I took off the noise reduction and maxed the sharpness to 10. Actually, although this caused a few artifacts, the craters do show up better. http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandstuart/3969408315/
I had a look at the Flickr moon shots group http://www.flickr.com/groups/moonshots/ and I have to say that some other results are better than mine. I think that a photo taken a couple of nights ago would have been better as the lower sun (from the point of view of the moon!) would show up many more craters.
p.1 #4 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
Hi Mark -
I'll play, although not by your rules. Hopefully I'll have my 7D at the end of this week - so this is with a 50D, the same lens, and some other stuff; generally, I did bother with "all that palaver." (By the way, not being familiar with ENGLISH, that word is new to me - thanks for introducing it - although I think I need to study its usage further.)
p.1 #5 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
OK, after seeing those, I'm going to have another go. I should point out that the reason my results were below par last time was probably because I had just dropped my 600/4 approx. 15 feet down some granite boulders. As you can imagine, this didn't do it much good at all but luckily I have a very understanding insurance company.
p.1 #6 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
PierreB wrote:
I should point out that the reason my results were below par last time was probably because I had just dropped my 600/4 approx. 15 feet down some granite boulders. As you can imagine, this didn't do it much good at all but luckily I have a very understanding insurance company.
Ah, more English-ness... the use of understatement!
P.S. I realize that not all of "United Kingdom" is England - although I usually need to look up the distinction between "Great Britain" and "United Kingdom."
I did this many years ago with a 6mp Canon D60. The lens setup was the 400mm F5.6 and a 2X teleconverter. The effective focal length (EFL) was ~1280mm (400mm * 2XTC * 1.6 image sensor crop).
All images were shot with the same focal length, so one can get a sense of scale of these three celestial objects with respect to one another when viewed from Earth.
p.1 #8 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
paulfeng wrote:
Ah, more English-ness... the use of understatement!
P.S. I realize that not all of "United Kingdom" is England - although I usually need to look up the distinction between "Great Britain" and "United Kingdom."
As it happens, I'm not English, I'm a Guern, and I thank you for realising that there is a difference.
The descriptions "United Kingdom", "Great Britain" and the "British Isles" all refer to different collections of countries / islands / small outcrops of rock. I live one one of the aforementioned rocks, Guernsey, which is part of the British Isles but not the other two (I think).
p.1 #9 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
PierreB wrote:
As it happens, I'm not English, I'm a Guern, and I thank you for realising that there is a difference.
The descriptions "United Kingdom", "Great Britain" and the "British Isles" all refer to different collections of countries / islands / small outcrops of rock. I live one one of the aforementioned rocks, Guernsey, which is part of the British Isles but not the other two (I think).
I had not realized that Guernsey was closer to France than the UK (which the forum software thinks you are a part of). Does that explain your French-ish name?
A sizable minority of us United Statesians (no one to be taken seriously says that, by the way) recognize Guernsey and Jersey as varieties of cows; I suppose those bovines came from your way? Also, I just looked it up - the movie "The Others" was set on Jersey, but not filmed there.
p.1 #11 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
Paul's pic is fantastic. Apart from his superior equipment (I've got a tripod and a remote release, but not the two 1.4x'es), I suspect that his pic was taken a couple of nights earlier, when the shadows of the mountains and in the craters were more prominent. I'll have another go sometime. Well done to Paul anyway!
p.1 #13 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
markhbfindlay wrote:
Paul's pic is fantastic. Apart from his superior equipment (I've got a tripod and a remote release, but not the two 1.4x'es), I suspect that his pic was taken a couple of nights earlier, when the shadows of the mountains and in the craters were more prominent. I'll have another go sometime. Well done to Paul anyway!
Thanks Mark... the photo was taken back on Feb 5th; in terms of moon phase, probably a day or two younger than yours.
It was taken at 24 Fahrenheit... another way I diverged from your advice, but much warmer than when I did the same shot with the 40D another 12.5 months earlier, when it was -10 F.
p.1 #14 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
Mark, the rule of thumb is that with 35mm, the image of the moon is 1/2 inch per 100mm of focal length. Also, on a clear night, use any daylight exposure you like, which means you can run your ISO and shutter speed as high as you like. Nice work, BTW
p.1 #16 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
44lefty wrote:
Mark, the rule of thumb is that with 35mm, the image of the moon is 1/2 inch per 100mm of focal length.
With all due respect:
I'm not sure where this rule comes from, but with 800mm of focal length, I can assure you that the disk of the moon was not 4 inches in diameter at my sensor.
p.1 #18 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
Thanks for the correction, Larry.
By my calculation (based upon the approx pixel size of my moon image, pixel pitch, etc.), I get a bit more than 1/3 inch per 1000 mm. (Great mix of units there...)
p.1 #19 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
I developed an excel spreadsheet to analyze bodies and lens.
One of the calculations is the % of the sensor the moon will occupy and the number of pixels.
As bodies develop, I intend to take pictures with my 400 f2.8 and 2x and 1.4x (and perhaps another 2.0x)
If the moon is imaged with a 50d using an 800mm lens the image will occupy 49% of the sensor height and be 1538 pixels high. For a 7D it is also 49% but 1682 pixels high.
With a 1.6x crop camera it takes a 1600mm lens to take an image of the moon that occupies 98% of the sensor.
p.1 #20 · How to photograph the moon with a Canon EOS 7d
Photographing the moon gets more interesting when you try to include other objects in your composition. You will find out that the moon is traveling bloody fast!
These were shot with a 20D and 300mm f2.8 IS+1,4x+2x combo.
work without all the fuss?
