Originally posted by Mundj Be careful of your shutter speed because at 300mm the moon is moving pretty fast.
Originally posted by K2 to K50 Just came in from a very unsuccessful attempt to moon shoot with my 55-300mm PLM lens.
So long as you are keeping your shutter speed above about 1/4s movement of the moon across the night sky won't matter as it has an angular speed across the night sky slightly slower than that of the stars. Since the moon is really bright, unless in the umbra during an eclipse, you should never have to shoot the moon that slow. It has a fairly high linear speed as it is pretty close to the celestial ecliptic but that is relative to other stars in the night sky that are closer to the celestial poles. However keep in mind that it is still moving slower than the stars in the sky so if the stars don't show trails then the moon won't either.
The general rule for shooting the moon is the Loony 11 rule which means:
Set your shutter speed to 1/ISO and your f stop to 11 and you will have settings in the general ballpark for a correct exposure of the moon. This will result in a black sky unless you are shooting during the day. Because the moon is so bright in and the sky is so dark any auto exposure mode tends to fail miserably as you are typically at or beyond the limits of the dynamic range your camera can do. Thus lots of moon shots will be composite images were you expose for the moon, and then expose for what ever else you were shooting.
Since you were shooting off of a tripod shooting at ISO 100 using the Loony 11 rule at 300mm should have the potential to produce nice images. However you may find that your tripod or tripod head is not up to the task as it might not be ridged enough unless you are using the 2 second mirror up delay. Bigger heavier lenses will only make this worse as I found out a while back using a giant old Russian 1000mm f/10 reflector with a 2x converter. DIY wood tripods are a cheap good solution if one is handy at building things, if one is not good at building things that would likely be a recipe of disaster. I built one last month for under $50 and it is rock solid and probably has a safe load capacity of around 500lbs and if I wanted more I would probably have to upgrade to a concrete pier.
Originally posted by K2 to K50 My main need here, now, (after being made aware of the M setting on the KP's Mode dial!!) is to get a 55-300mm PLM lens owner to give me some tips on focusing on the moon, give the 55-300mm's focusing ring does not have an infinity stop. Not sure how much I can rely on my 75 yr old eyes to do that - perhaps I need to start trying out Live View mode?
Focusing on the moon is key, I have taken to using a
Bahtinov mask for focusing when I use my 300mm lens. Basically point the lens at the brightest star (make sure int isn't a planet) you can see,
get the correct diffraction pattern, then point at the moon. When focusing get the focus close to correct, autofocus on the moon will probably work, and center as best you can the star in the viewfinder. Put the camera into magnified live view with focus peaking turned off. Stick the Bahitnov mask on the front of the lens. Adjust the focus until it is perfect.
A lot of shooting the moon is luck in getting the perfect calm upper atmosphere, so here my advise is blast away in burst mode. The law of big numbers and delete are your friend here since you are going for those lucky shots assuming that you did everything else technically correct. Look at the bad images figure out what went wrong, learn from them, and delete them.