Stock Shot Project

Last night the moon was at its closest point to earth making it brighter and larger than normal.  Achieving a quality image of the moon is harder than it might appear.  First of all, you need an extremely long focal length of 1200-1800mm to fill the frame.  Next, the moon is actually moving at a fairly fast pace so you need a high shutter speed.  I was working from home and my longest telephoto lenses were at the studio so I had to make do with either the Nikon 200-400 zoom or 300mm tele.  I added a 1.7x extender to increase the focal length, and decided to use the Nikon D7000 because its smaller sensor added a further 1.5x focal length multiplier.This gave me an effective 765mm length with the 300 lens, and 1020mm with the 400mm lens.  Unfortunately this fell short of the ideal 1200-1800mm length so I did have to crop the final image to achieve what you see here.

I do not like to push the ISO on the D700 so I tried it at both 100 and 200.  The moon was so bright that I was able to shoot at 1/500 sec even at 100 ISO.  Camera shake is a major problem with an extremely long lens setup so I used a double tripod -- one for the lens and one for the camera.  An extremely nice feature of all professional Nikon DSLR cameras is that they have a mirror lock-up setting readily selectable from a dial on top of the body.  Mirror lock-up is necessary to further avoid camera shake.  Of course the most pleasant part of the shot was that I was able to do it right from my open apartment window.