Full Moon Shoot

[Kenneth Burgener]

I shot the full moon last night, for a time lapse film. Kinda sucked. Any ideas how to get something better ?

[Chris Medico]

Define sucked.

No moon detail? No moon at all?

[Bill Ward]

With a GoPro? I think I have identified your problem.

[Kenneth Burgener]

My moon looked lonely and naked. No detail at all. I have done several sunrises and sunsets and they are all beginning to look alike. I did put our company name on one, and it looks good.

[Jim Michael]

I would guess the dynamic range between the full moon (f8 and inverse of ISO shutter speed) and landscape (time exposure?) might necessitate shooting 2 exposures for each frame and combining in some HDR software, or else constructing a composite from 2 streams in your editor.

[Jim Andrada]

I'm almost surprised you can even see that the Moon is present considering the wide angle lens on the GP:<)

I took a Moon shot the other day just as it rose over the mountains - I used a 400mm lens on a Canon 5D and was wishing I had a 500mm

Time lapse with set of bracketed HDR stills would be the way to go if you want moon detail as well as surrounding detail. There's quite a wide dynamic range to deal with - after all the Moon is reflecting the light of the Sun

[John Mahoney]

I.m no whiz-kid at Moon shots as I have only recently started on this. I use a Fuji S5 Pro and a 300mm zoom lens. My method is to use an ISO of 100, manual focus, which shows up in the cropped shots and F/5.6 at 1/200 or so. I use a tripod and a cable shutter release. Here are a few I took recently. I understand the Go Pro is a rather small camera, physically, so I can understand the difficulty in getting acceptable shots. I agree with Jim Andrada, in that I'd like a bigger zoom lens for this. Original shots were 4256x2848.

[Mark Watson]

Canon 7D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM + 1.4X extender.
Shutter speed 1/800, aperture f/5.6, ISO 400. Focal length 280mm.

[Jim Andrada]

OK - here's one I took a week or so back - slightly modified

[Jim Andrada]

Whoops - trying again to get the attachment to show up

[Ian Newland]

Was it shot with the GoPro3+Blk? ? .....if yes, That will be your problem, as the 3+Blk has an infinity focus issue requiring tweaking of the lens to set fixed focus correctly from 2ft to infinity. Distance objects have no details at the current setting.

[Bill Ward]

Ian: are the newly manufactured Gopro 3+ cameras no longer displaying the infinity issue? Or is it still a big problem?

[Fran Guidry]

I spent a week or so learning out how to get a shot of the moon for a little "watch me play guitar" video:

Hanalei Moon - Hawaiian slack key - YouTube

What I learned really surprised me. The moon is lit by full sunlight, so the exposure for shooting the moon needs to be the same as the exposure for a sunlit day.

Getting this exposure from an all-auto device like the GoPro is pretty tricky. The one thing I can think of that might help would be to set the exposure measure to "spot" in the "Capture Settings" area. And 1080 Narrow for your video mode, of course.

Fran

[Ian Newland]

Originally Posted by Bill Ward

Ian: are the newly manufactured Gopro 3+ cameras no longer displaying the infinity issue? Or is it still a big problem?

New stock is gradually replacing the "faulty" shipments, but there is still "faulty" stock floating around in store back rooms etc, serial nos and dates cannot be relied upon. . Anything ordered direct from GoPro is assured "issue" free.

I use inverted commas as for some people close focus is desired, thus therefore not an issue and the general consumer isn't noticing the lack of detail in the distant subject matter and quite happy with the camera.