More Night Photography

Since I took the last moon photo, I’ve become obsessed with the likelihood of taking moon photographs later at night.

The problem with that idea is two-fold.

To take decent photographs of the moon, I need to either adjust the ISO setting and exposure time myself (which I’m not a sufficiently accomplished photographer to do on the run) or have the camera on a setting where it adjusts them itself (rather than on a fully automatic setting). If I just try to use a fully automatic setting, the camera will insist on using the flash, to compensate for the poor lighting. And using the flash ruins the ambient lighting.

But allowing the camera to adjust its own ISO settings and exposure to compensate for low-light shooting also means that the shutter has to be open for longer. Plus, the moon itself is too far away for my camera to focus comfortably on it. So I need to have the moon near something else, so that the camera can focus on what’s in the foreground while still taking a relatively crisp photograph of the moon.

That’s where I was lucky last time, since the grevillea was nearby and the moon had risen early: it wasn’t full dark when I took the last moon photos.

And that’s why I couldn’t resist trying to take these photographs when the moon moved over the palm tree in our back garden late tonight (about three hours later than the last photos were taken):

The clouds create an interesting effect, too: