Every time I take a picture of a scene including a full moon (which admittedly is not many times), the moon ends up looking like just a white circle, with none of the details visible. Suggestions? Is it just overexposed?
IANA Photographer, but I’ve tried taking pictures of the moon. They mostly come out blurred, but some have come out ok.
It helps (looks interesting) if the moon is illuminating the surrounding clouds.
If you are getting a white circle it is possibly out of focus slightly, as well as over exposed (as possibilities).
If you’re trying to shoot the moon by itself (no other objects visible in the frame, then I’d say yes, it’s just over-exposed.
Most people don’t about it, but when you’re seeing (or taking a picture of) the moon, you’re viewing an object that is in direct sunlight, just like you would be if were full daylight.
This means the moon is fairly brightly lit. The problem is that your camera’s light meter sees this big black sky with a comparatively small but bright object in it, and tries to average things out. The big dark sky wins, the meter opens the camera wide and takes a nice long exposure trying to get that sky a bit less dark. This washes out the detail in the moon completely, and you get a white circle.
Assuming your camera doesn’t have a 1 degree spot meter or a zoom lens that allows you fill the frame with the moon, you need to set your camera in manual mode.
With ASA 100 film, shoot at about F11 for a 1/100 second exposure, and bracket up and down a stop or two to be sure.
Overexposure is very likely. Remember, the moon is illuminated by direct sunlight. You most likely need to use manual exposure or exposure compensation to force a short exposure. And, of course, make sure everything else in the photo is lit brightly enough to show up with the short exposure. If that isn’t practical, you could always take one long and one short exposure and combine them in Photoshop.
It depends on the type of camera you’re using, you’ll get the best results with a 35MM SLR…
you want to get the longest practical lens you can get, ideally, a telescope with a camera mount, try to fill the viewfinder with as much of the moon as possible
if your camera has a center-weighted meter (most 35’s do), put as much of the metered area on the moon as possible, if your camera (i have a Nikon F4S) has multiple meter options, try to use the spot-meter, the “matrix” style meters are useless in time exposures, as your only point of light is dead center in the frame, you don’t want the matrix meter balancing the light of the moon against the darkness of the sky, center or spot metering concentrates the metering area on the moon itself
if you’re using a telescope, you can typically use a short exposure time, you may even be able to use an automatic exposure mode (aperture priority preferred)
if you don’t have access to a telescope, and you’re using a long lens, zoom it out to the maximum focal length, set a wide aperture (f 2.8/f 4/ f 5.6) to get as much light into the camera as possible, you won’t need the wide depth-of-field that a narrow aperture will give you, you might be able to get a metered automatic exposure if the lens is long enough, but using your standard long lens (lets say a 210MM F 4.0) you’ll need to make a series of time exposures
that’s the secret really, time exposures and bracketing, take a series of photos, each with a slightly longer exposure time
one final thing to bear in mind, the longer the exposure, the more chances you’ll get of a “stripe” of light as the moon moves thru the sky
with standard camera lenses and equipment, moon exposures are luck-of-the-draw really, if you can afford a telescope and camera mount (or spotting scope and mount), you’ll get much better results
Over at the Popular Photograpy site there is some great information in the “forum” section. When you get there, do a search for “moon.” There’s some great threads on the subject. One poster, Daniel Amick, seems quite knowledgable and posts a ‘tutorial’ of sorts every once in a while. It’s quite informative. I’ll tey a hyperlink right here.
I hope the link works. In Daniels’s post he has several links that are helpful as well.
There’s some great information on that site (as well as several other photgraphy and astonomy sites) Have fun shooting.
I’ll try the hyperlink
Thanks for the tips, everyone. I’ll try to remember them the next time I see the moon and try to take a picture of it.
At most I’d be using a 300mm lens, so the moon is big enough to see details but not really big enough to be the only thing in the picture (unless I get some huge print of it or something). I’d be mostly after some sort of thing where the moon is low in the sky with stuff in the foreground, I guess. An example of that is a picture I was looking at that made me start this thread- I was at the Grand Canyon in March for one day and it happened to be the night of the full moon, so I took a picture of the moon rising over the canyon (just before it got absolutely freezing). Unfortunately what I see now is a picture of the Grand Canyon with a white disk above it.
Anyway, I’ll bear in mind the advice here and hope for better next time. 
The correct exposure is 1/(ASA or ISO) @ f16
Which, strangely enough, is the correct settings for a sunny day at the beach…
from my “Murphy’s Laws of Photography” poster…
“1/60th of a second at F/8 is the correct exposure for all photographs”
some other classics
when Man creates a sharper lens, Nature will create a fuzzier subject
Lens caps and cable releases can become invisible at will
falling lenses are attracted to rocks
yes, photographers do it in the dark, but they have to stop everey 30 seconds to agitate the developer
How to take a picture of a full moon:
First, drop your pants or get a good friend (a very good friend) to drop his for you.
One other thing to remember, the moon is not holding still. It’s a moving target.
If you want a closeup of the moon, go 500mm (minimum) or longer on a 35mm camera. I’ve used 800mm and 1000mm. Expose at 1/(film speed) for the shutter speed, and f/16 for the aperture. Shoot at the same speed using f/11 and f/22 to bracket the shot. Use a tripod and a cable release. If you do your own black and white developing and printing, then do it. Then you can crop and frame as you please, and not worry about the local shop screwing it up.
It’s very hard to take a good landscape shot with the moon in it with a single exposure. If you expose for the moon, you’ll get a very dark foreground, possibly losing the details that you wanted to keep. One approach, if you use digital, is to use a tripod and take several exposures, bracketing the scene. Then you can use the magic of Photoshop to blend the images.
You also should remember that the moon appears unusually large when it’s on the horizon, but that this is an optical illusion. So if you’re using anything less than a 200-300 lens, the moon will just be a tiny bright blob in the picture.
Not strange at all since the moon is a sunny day at the beach. Well the seas have no water but it’s lit by direct sunlight.
How do you get a good shot of the full moon, when it is rising over a ridge? I saw a moonrise once, and it is so beautiful to see it behind a pine tree on a ridge! Is scuh a big lens a necessity (500 mm)?
It’s all a matter of how big you want the moon to be in the frame. It’s simple geometry to calculate the lens needed. The apparent size of the moon is about one half degree. A quick lookup in a trig table says that the if you use a 500mm lens on a 35mm film camera the moon will take slightly more than 1/3 the short dimension of the frame. A 200-300mm lens Look still gives a reasonably large moon. Look at Ansel Adams’ Moonrise over Hernandez. The moon looks big in a print but it’s a very tiny fraction of the frame.
If you want to get that kind of shot without too much trickery you’ll need to shoot a near full moon just before dusk when the background and sky is still bright so it can be exposed correctly without massively overexposing the moon. You may need to play with curves but I consider that the equivalent of contrast control that is done with film which IMHO isn’t disingenuous as combining two different frames.