Full Moon Grab Shot

Full moon.  Camera and lens settings in the narrative below. This is a 2.8mp crop from the original 24mp file.
(click to enlarge)

This past Saturday gave us a beautiful full moon.  My wife and I had gone out to dinner for our 44th wedding anniversary (I'm really the lucky one in this marriage).  As we were returning home we crossed over the 5 mile wide James River.   We looked to our right and saw the moon looming low over the horizon—looking especially large.  It was so orange it would have been easy to mistake it for an October Harvest Moon.  Since I was on an interstate highway crossing a large body of water, it would not have been prudent to stop and make some images without causing ourselves and others unnecessary danger.  But for a nanosecond, the thought crossed my mind!  We admired it and drove home.

Later, that same night, as I was getting ready to turn in, the moon shined its light brightly through my southern windows.  I looked out to just admire the sight and seeing little humidity in the air, no halo of ice crystals around the moon and no clouds, I decided to make a few images of it.

I broke out my Fujifilm X-H1, attached the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 lens, added the 1.4X tele-converter and walked out on my front porch.  I set the camera to manual, ISO 200 and adjusted the image in my viewfinder (Ahhh! The benefits of mirrorless!) until it looked bright but detailed.  As we know, a full moon exposure is not too different from a daylight exposure and if you allow your camera to set your exposure, because of the massive amount of black sky, often times your moon will turn out to be a white blob with no detail.

In this case, at the full frame field of view of 840mm, ISO 200, f/11, I set the shutter speed 1/250th second.  Handholding my camera and lens while leaning against a porch column, I snapped off several images.  I had the camera set to record RAW but I then changed the settings to RAW + JPEG and, using the Q-Menu, added contrast and sharpening.  I then made some additional images, checked them in the viewfinder, smiled to myself, then went off to bed thinking that I captured the moon exactly as I wanted.

On Sunday, I looked very closely at my images, picked out one, edited it and voilà!  There you have it! Simple, easy and satisfying.  A nice memory of our anniversary.

By the way, the combination of the image stabilization in the lens and the IBIS in the camera pretty much assured me the images would be sharp!  And they are.

P.S. Please don't tell my wife that I've owned more cameras than years we've been married!  Lol.
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Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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