With the beautiful wheather we had this week-end, the clear skies and the moon rising every night, I decided to try and sharpen my skills taking some moon shots.

Used the Sigma APO 50-500 (at 500mm) with a 2x teleconverter. Was'nt taken handheld, with the 0.3" time value, had to use the tripod with the mirror lock 3 s. option.

Focus a pretty hard to find, the smallest move on the focus ring changes a lot and it's kinda hard to SEE the right focus in the little viewfinder. On THIS, I still need a lot of practice.

Think they came out O.K. Any comments are welcome to improve my skills. Personnaly, I prefer the 1st one : more details in the shadows around the craters.

Taken Saturday, May 22nd. Little cloudy, 10:30 PM :


Take Monday,May 24th. Clear sky, 9:50 PM :

[Adam]

My only suggestion would be to use a lower iso and a higher shutter speed- the moon moves, after all, and anything below 1/60s is subject to motion blur. Obviously, if you're @1000mm F11, then there might not be much you can do. I've found that you get much better results around 300 F2.8 and without the teleconverter, just blowing the images up. Not bad shots, though!

[tootall]

I've found that you get much better results around 300 F2.8 and without the teleconverter, just blowing the images up. Not bad shots, though!

100% agree with Adam on this, I just don't have a 300 F2.8 but its on my wish list. But using my 400mm with a 2xTC vs the same 400mm without the TC and just cropping, I get a lot sharper image without the TC. I normally start shooting at 100 ISO and shutter around the 1/160 mark and then play with the settings from there.

With the focusing, you should be able to just set the lens to infinity and not touch it.

[Nowhere Matt]

Your watermark goes well with the subject.
And you are right. Some images of The Moon are more interesting when it is not full.
The first image is less distracting.