Full Moon

Well, it's been a day of extremes today with my two candidate blips taking me from effective lens sizes (allowing for magnifiers, teleconverters and the like) of 8mm and 500mm. I went for the long view in the end.

I'd been expecting the moon to be a tricky subject to photograph but for all the wrong reasons. People talk about the difficulty of getting the exposure right, but that wasn't too bad. What turned out to be really tough (and I didn't manage it to my own satisfaction in the end) was locking focus. It was too dim for autofocus, the angle of the camera made it too hard to look through the viewfinder and because the moon outshines the sky around it it was burnt out on the live view. In the end I just turned the dial to infinity. The result is rather soft but I'm not sure whether that's poor focus or the sheer number of layers of glass the image had to make its way through!