Moon Over New York City

May 4, 2012 Supermoon over the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge

Last night I went scoping out locations to shot tonight's supermoon. As recommended below, it is best to use a tripod and a telephoto lens. I did not use either. 

This exposure was 2 seconds at f4, ISO 200. I braced the camera on a guard rail and used the time release to trigger the exposure. Of course, this blows out the moon, so I merged the moon details in Photoshop. The correct exposure for the moon that I used for the detail was f5.6 at 1/125 of a second at ISO 200.

This was shot with a Nikon D50 with an 18-55mm zoom - a stronger zoom would have made the moon look larger. The moon was also a little too high in the sky - the closer to the horizon, the larger it looks.

Nikon D7000 Black Digital SLR Camera Kit

Night Photography - Nikon

I used to enjoy night photography with film, because you never quite knew what you would get. Now with digital photography, I probably enjoy night photography even more precisely because of the instant feedback.

Eiffel Tower at night as seen through a Nikon D50

If you want to try night photography, you will be dealing with very long exposure time since there is not a lot of light at night as far as the camera is concerned. This means, you should have a tripod to get the best results. I don't like lugging a tripod around, so I just place my camera on the ground, or in the case of the picture above, the hand rail on a bridge.

In this picture, my camera was set to ISO 400 and aperture priority. I wanted a long exposure time to burn in the tower and the street lights and I wanted a broad depth of field, so I set the aperture at f16. This resulted in an 8 second exposure. To avoid camera shake from pressing the shutter release, I set the timer and waited.

This is the result:

What the camera recorded

I used Adobe Lightroom to get to the final version. How I did that will have to wait for another post.