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Apr 22, 2016

Shooting The Moon and Focusing Manually

The moon can be a difficult subject for a photograph. It's bright, so the shutter speed needs to be fast and the ISO low. It's near impossible to catch a good picture of the moon shooting in auto mode because the camera tries to expose for the darkness of the sky, which causes the moon to be over exposed.
With the darkness of the sky, it can sometimes be hard to focus your camera correctly as well. Many times the camera will do a pretty good job of focusing, since the moon is bright, however, sometimes it may be necessary to use manual focus.
Using manual focus can cause some difficulties in the sharpness of your image if your focus isn't just right. As shown in the above picture, the details of the moon are blurred and out of focus.
The focus can be even harder to get right if there are things like branches in front of the moon.
To help get the focus sharp, put your camera on a tripod and set the camera to live-view mode. You should have an option to zoom in on the LCD screen without effecting the composition of your image; do this and zoom as close to the moon as possible.
Set your focus while you're zoomed and then don't touch it again. (unless you move your camera)
Now you can zoom back out and make a few tweaks to the composition as needed before you take your shot.
This method can be used on anything else that requires manual focus as well.



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