Good Morning, brand new and a bit frustrated

Josephballison

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Good morning,

My name is Joseph and I live in hell (Phoenix AZ). Have enjoyed taking pictures all of my life and just recently before I went to Cancun decided to purchase a real camera. Picked up a Canon t5 on amazon, one of those bundle deals and honestly, love it. It seems like a good camera, takes good pictures. A friend of mine recommended lightroom and I have been having fun with that as well.

Here is my issue if anyone feels that they would like to point me in the right direction. Last night I was taking some pictures of the moon to get some practice because I am going to run out to the desert tonight and see if I can get the supermoon coming up over the valley. When opening the picture in light room and zooming in, I see what might be a field of stars but in all honesty is probably just a ton of white spots. Using lightroom I tried to correct it, but either the photo is crap, or I am not good enough in lightroom yet.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all for your time and consideration in reading this post and I hope everyone has a Great Day!!!
 
Probably best to post some of said pics and let the pros here take a look.
 
Thank you,

It is a 20Mb file so I can share it from my onedrive along with the other RAW photos that I have.

RAW
 
I downloaded the first image, and got a beach, not the moon. Where is the moon shot?

Anyway, if you are getting some white spots in the sky that are not stars, then it's probably "noise". There might be a utility in Lightroom that will mitigate the noise.
 
I apologize, I did not rename them, It should be the last one.
 
I viewed your moon pic full size and see no noise, but the moon is very soft focus.

Incidentally, you can upload JPEGs at 1050 pixels on the longest side.
 
I disagree with the previous post about lack of noise. This is an EXTREMELY noisy image! Designer may not have zoomed in to full size, and when viewing the full frame, it did just look soft.

Here's an assist so others can see it and contribute. This is a 1280-960 crop of the center of the your image, otherwise unprocessed.

IMG_1212.jpg


Your EXIF data shows ISO 3200, which is probably simply too high for that camera. The image is very noisy, which is the white dots you refer to.

High ISO produces random data in the image which in engineer-speak is "noise." Increasing the ISO setting of a camera can be thought of as simply increases the gain of the amplifiers in the camera that pull data from the sensor. In an audio amplifier for your stereo system, noise is the hiss you hear when you crank it up. It's simply a random signal that is not part of the actual signal you want to listen to. Similarly, noise in a picture is random data that is not actually part of the image that you want to see. Using high ISO is like turning up the volume, and any random data the sensor produces becomes a stronger part of the resulting image.

Noise can be filtered, up to a point, but this image is not sharp enough in the first place to give a satisfactory result with any filtering. I don't know if that's a result of lens quality or maybe just missing focus. I suspect lens quality if that's a kit lens supplied in the camera package. You should be able to get a perfectly usable full moon image with ISO down at 400. If you're metering, you want to use the spot meter, which ignores everything except the very center of the image.
 
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Thank you:)

That has been a fear that the lense is not good enough, I am also sure that I didn't focus correctly or that I am still working with a limitation of the lense.

I have received some good advise from a few sources and will try them tonight. Worst case scenario is I try again the next time a supermoon comes around
 
That has been a fear that the lense is not good enough,
Indirectly, you could say that’s the case.
Noise doesn’t only come from the simple fact you used a high ISO setting; it’s mostly because you actually captured little light in the image. Increasing the ISO doesn’t mean you actually capture more light—you capture the same amount of light, just “amplify” it. You can let more light in by using a wider aperture (smaller f-number) or longer exposure (slower shutter speed), then more light hits the sensor.
Many modern sensors are dubbed “ISO-invariant,” which means the ISO setting makes little to no difference. With those sensors, there’s little to no benefit in setting the ISO to 800 and getting “correct” exposure according to the camera’s meter, instead of “underexposing” by 3 stops and shooting at ISO 100 with the same aperture and shutter speed, and then brightening the image in post processing. However, it’s been said that Canon is the exception here—even their latest sensors aren’t “ISO-invariant.”
Going back to the first few words, “Indirectly, you could say that’s the case”: If you already shot the image at the lens's maximum aperture (smallest f-number), your only option for capturing more light is by lengthening the exposure. At some point that may become a problem, as both Earth and the moon are moving objects, so with very long exposures you may get motion blur. If your only option is to use a wider aperture, and you don’t have a wider aperture to choose, then the lens isn’t good enough.

That being said, you shouldn’t be afraid of noise. I made that mistake myself many times, but I have found that only a little bit of noise reduction in very low light is needed for web use. That may change a bit once 4K becomes a mainstream standard for all digital displays, but for the time being, most people view web content at 1080p. You can use that to your advantage and export down-sampled images, and that may go a long way towards hiding/eliminating the noise.

Worst case scenario is I try again the next time a supermoon comes around
Well, if you want to catch another total eclipse of a supermoon, you only need to wait 18 years. That’s a lot of time to learn and perfect your technique ;-) . Well, that’s assuming it’s visible in your area ;-) . Regular supermoons—the plain moon, only larger—should show up a lot more often, though.
 

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