anirudhchandrakant

Photographing The Moon

The human eye is incredible because it can discern ranges in exposure that are beyond the capability of today's cameras. You look at the moon and at once, you can see the details within the moon (the rabbit on the moon) and the glow around it. Cameras fare miserably at this. At normal exposure, all you get is a washed out moon with a little glow around it. Underexpose it and you get great details within the moon, but all the glow around it is lost. Overexpose it and the glow is radiant, but there are no details at all. A simple image search will show you what i am talking about.

Yesterday, apart from being a blue moon, the moon was also at its biggest and brightest for the year. I wanted to photograph it as close as possible to how the human eye sees it. Knowing this was impossible with one shot, i set up my tripod and captured multiple shots of the moon at different exposures. My assumption was that once i was done, i could simply use a HDR creation software (like qtpfsgui), combine the images and get the perfect exposure. It was only after i got the images on the computer that a fairly obvious thing struck me. The earth moves. And fast. All the images had the moon at slightly different positions; these differed by mere pixels, but that was sufficient to completely confuse the software.

To save me time and accommodate for my lack of patience, I settled in on two images. One was made at -5EV exposure and the other at +4EV, with all other settings the same. The first image got the details within the moon and the second one got the glow fairly well. I used GIMP to create two separate layers with these images and lined them one on top of the other. Finally, i adjusted the exposure of this composite image the best i could, in aperture.

Here it is:

Next stop, photographing the moon with the stars!