How To Take Pictures Of The Moon

This weekend was a good one. I finally found time to go shopping for a tripod and found one that I really liked (yay!). Then I had to wait until night time so that I could test out my tripod and finally figure out how to take pictures of the moon! 

I spent some time playing around with different settings and totally by accident finally found a combination that worked! You can take a look at the pictures below, I've included the settings that I used to take each shot so that you can test out the same thing with your own camera.

To take these pictures I used my Nikon D3100 DSLR and my 55-200mm lens. In some of the below pictures, I cropped the images to give you a closer view of the moon - which still gives a good quality picture.

Aperture: F5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/3
ISO: 450
White Balance: Incandescent B4, G4

Aperture: F5.6
Shutter Speed: 4
ISO: 100
White Balance: Incandescent B4, G4

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B2,M2

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy A3,M2

Aperture: F29
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B6,M6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B6,M6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy A6,M6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy A6,G6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B6,G6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1
ISO: 100
White Balance: Cloudy 0,0

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/10
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy 0,0

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy 0,0

 So, in summary. If you would like to take a cool moon photo with your DSLR and you're not sure how to start, try these initial settings and then take it from there:

• Aperture: The F-stop number should be as large as possible. My largest F-stop is 32. (In other words the hole should be as small as possible).
• Your shutter speed should be around 1/6th - 1/50th of a second. 1 second gives you an overexposed image and anything shorter than 1/50th of a second and your moon will start looking like a ghost.
• ISO: should be a smaller number, rather than a larger number. Your ISO is the sensitivity of your sensor to the light, the lower the ISO, the less sensitive it is to light. 
• White Balance: in this case, a white balance of 0,0 is fine. I was playing around with the white balance settings and that is what let me take "coloured" pictures of the moon.

Other then cropping some of my images, I didn't do any other post image processing on them, so all the colours and effects are from playing with the different settings!