Thursday, 17 October 2013

How to: Photograph the Moon with HDR

This will just be a quick run through how I take photos of the moon. My equipment used is a Skywatcher 80ED telescope (equivelant of a 600mm lens) with a Canon 600D mounted to it. A remote trigger was also used.


Picture settings are set to Manual, RAW files, with bracketing switched on and ISO set to 400. I then use the live-view and 10x zoom on the edge to perfect the focus using the telescope. I'll set the shutter speed (no aperture don't forget!) so the moon has average tones and then take the 3 bracketed shots. I'll then adjust the initial shutter speed slightly to change the exposures further. This evening I took 5 sets of bracketed shots (15 photos in total). 

I then open every 3rd image to see the quality of it on a bigger scale. If I find a set of 3 that I'm reasonably happy with I'll load the 3 chosen images into Photomatix (or your preferred HDR-type program). 

In this case the B&W Natural preset gives a nice range of tones. 



I'm very new to processing HDR so I don't generally fiddle around with it to much. Once I've exported the HDR shot, I'll stick it in photoshop and touch up some of the layers. 



Finally, crop and save.





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