Digital Photo of the moon settings?

[moserak]

Hello...I own a Panasonic DMC-TS3 and even on tripod I can never get a clear and clean photo of the moon. I have tried multiple changes to menu options to no avail. Can anyone make some suggestion for this specific camera or even in general. Thank you in advance and have a great day!

[Hawgwild]

Hi Moserak, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, while your camera is very good for its intended purposes, moon shots are not among them, I'm afraid. Decent moon shots require two things at a minimum. Sufficient optical zoom, and full manual mode ie: aperture, shutter speed, and iso. Without manual controls, the camera will tend to overexpose the moon and completely wash out all crater detail you might get otherwise. Maybe someone else will call me on my opinion. We'll see.

set the camera to 'moon scene mode'

:P

[VTphotog]

Unless you can spot meter on the face of the moon, or nearly fill the fame with it, your camera is going to try for an average exposure value for the whole scene, making the moon very overexposed, with, usually quite a halo as well. As Robert mentions, you will need to have manual control over the exposure.

the moon is reflected sunlight

exposure = 1/100 sec at f11 at iso 100

requires a tripod and remote release

[Ozzie_Traveller]

G'day mate

Sorry mate - have to agree with ^^^ above ... you will need something like the FZ200 of one of its mates where you have more than 4x zoom

When the time eventually arrives, you will get some good pix no doubt
ps- if you would like to receive a PDF document from my student training materials about moon photography, PM me and we'll arrange to get it to you

Phil

[Streets]

ALWAYS USE SOFT FOCUS ON MOON PHOTOS. Minimum of 20x zoom is also required

[funbug]

Can someone direct me to correct help thread or provide info on including shooting depth of field Infront of the moon. Single moon shoots are fine with my 300mm zoom, tripod and shutter remote but how far must I be to include something to include it example tree branches around or in front of moon, I either blur the moon or branches turn invisible....

[TCav]

In order to keep the Moon in focus as well as something much closer, you need to use a very small aperture (numerically large f-number). What you're looking for is a hyperfocal distance that will result in a depth of field that encompasses infinity as well as something that's only a few hundred feet away.

According to DoFMaster.com, an APS-C dSLR with a 300mm lens, would need to use an aperture of f/32, and focus at a distance of 460 feet in order to have both the Moon and something only 440 feet away, in focus.

If your particular lens is capable of smaller apertures than that, you can use them to get a slightly larger depth of field, but you'd have to use a correspondingly longer shutter speed, and thus risk motion blur of the Moon due to the rotation of the Earth.