The moon over the Marina Tonight. c&c please.

Nautifish · Sep 22, 2010

It was a beautiful night tonight and instead of trying to get some photos by the light house again i decided to head on down too the Marina and give it a shot there.

LaFoto · Sep 22, 2010

After taking, and before presenting your photos, you MUST put them through some post processing to at least level the horizon line! It is no sign of "artistical freedom" to have it crooked here, I shouldn't think so. It just looks wrong.

And a question: who decides on your settings for your photos? Do you? Or do you let the camera decide?

If the latter applies, I suggest: don't. Don't let the camera decide on the ISO it went for here. It's much too high and you get an awful lot of noise. In night photography, you want to go with the lowest ISO, small aperture and looooong exposure. Tripod is indispensible, therefore, but you said in your other post that you do put the camera on a tripod. If that is the case, and you see the illuminated sea bathed in moon light, then why didn't you align your photos right there and then?

Bad Andy · Sep 22, 2010

Great composition idea. Be sure to check your horizon's as the ocean appears to be leaning way down on the left on all three images. My eyes were drawn to it. You can also see all of the boat masts are not aligned straight up and down.

20 seconds at f/22 is a bit long. The moon (and Jupiter seen below it tonight) are very bright. Long exposures create alot of noise, especially on the D5000 (I have experienced the same thing trying to photo meteor showers with no good luck yet). This long shutter speed causes the blurring of the boats and marina since they are bobbing back and forth ever so slightly.

As a suggestion, I would try opening up the lens a bit to say about f/8.0 or so. Adjust your shutter speed as necessary to compensate, but the moon is very bright. This should also help reduce the lens flare that is present in the first two shots above.

You may want to manually adjust your white balance. The marina lights (tungsten or sodium) have a very yellow/orange cast to them. While that is somewhat normal, you should try to correct some of the color balance.

If you aren't shooting RAW, you should as it gives you the most flexibility when editing and touching up your photos.

Keep shooting and have fun! You will be doing great in no time.

-Andy

Nautifish · Sep 22, 2010

I tryed to level my tripod as best as i could being that i was on a VERY STEEP HILL over looking the Marina...As for as my settings i had them set at Manual, Shutter speed was 20 / F11 My iso was at lo 0.3.

As far as the crookedness what ur saying is that i need to crop out some of my photo so it has a straight line?

reznap · Sep 22, 2010

The good: Backlit clouds and moon reflection on the water, nice.

The bad: The image is tilted... the moon is framed a little high, the foreground is framed a little low - maybe turning the camera to vertical would have improved the balance of the shot.

The ugly: Wow, what did you use to edit/compress these? You made D5000 pictures look like pics from a Motorola Razr.. See the posterization in the sky?

Nautifish said:
As far as the crookedness what ur saying is that i need to crop out some of my photo so it has a straight line?

No, he meant you need to rotate the whole image in editing software so the horizon is on a horizontal plane. Then you're forced to crop the image a little since you'll have blank spots on the corners.

Nautifish · Sep 22, 2010

Thank you Andy....& HERE WAS ME THINKING I HAD MY TRIPOD SET UP PRETTY STRAIGHT I GUESS NOT...LOL

The orange hue i get in my photo's does bug me and it is something i obviously need too work on.

Reznap i have not altered these photo's in anyway except down size them and that is all.

Bad Andy · Sep 22, 2010

Most editing programs have an alignment tool that will allow you to "rotate" the image to get it level.

Your EXIF data shows a setting of f/22 on all three pics, and an ISO of 400. Also the marina may not be as sharp since the camera was set at a focus of about .94 to 1.4 meters for the various shots above. I am not sure what was that close, but you should make sure your focus dots are locked on to a boat or the moon, or something farther away.

-Andy

Nautifish · Sep 22, 2010

hummm yet i am sure i had it set as too what i said previously.....:er:

I have alot of learning too do.....*sighs*..

reznap · Sep 22, 2010

With a wide angle (18mm is what you used) you can get away with leaving the lens at a large aperture and still get a deep depth of field. You could have then used a shorter shutter speed and lower ISO, and the moon might have looked more natural (well, overly bright but at least it would be round) without the star effect from the light leaking through the aperture blades.

Here's one I took the other night.. exposing to show stars and testing the cameras long exposure noise reduction.

Aperture - f/2.8
20 second exposure
ISO 400

zoogirlbc · Sep 22, 2010

I'm just learning how to shoot the moon too. Beatiful shot Rez, thanks for sharing your camera info.

Yuma · Sep 23, 2010

Don't seat it I shot the moon last night and it can be difficult. I was using a Canon T2i and I got a fair bit of noise I had my shutter speed at varying amounts with my aperature and ISO turned up full. Apparently I was backwards on the ISO >_<;

kundalini · Sep 23, 2010

Nautifish said:
My iso was at lo 0.3.

That sounds like Nikon speak. It's too early in the morning and I'm still on my first cuppa, but I would suggest to use your native base ISO (probably ISO200). The LO & HI ISO settings should be used as a last ditch effort to get the shot. They cause some deterioration in IQ.