188 - Southbank Triptych

Day 188. After spending a full day working in Brisbane I went for an evening stroll across the river and took a couple of shots down on Southbank which I then arranged into this little triptych using Diptic. It was a little chilly with not many people around, and it's a very different place when it's quiet like this.

017 - Moon Shot

Day 17. It was a beautiful full moon last night so I went out with my Nikon D7000 and tried to photograph it. I don't know if you've ever tried to take a photo of the moon but it's not quite as easy as you might imagine it should be.

This was taken with a 300mm lens at f10, 1/500th, 800ISO. It's actually quite hard to focus on the moon at night; you have to do it manually and it's hard to see exactly when you have focus (especially with my eyes!) You also have to guess a bit with the shutter and aperture settings because the camera's metering system doesn't quite know what to do with a bright white disk on a large black background. I metered the first few shots but the results were completely blown out so I resorted to a bit of guesswork.

I had the camera on a tripod and used a remote shutter release, but even then the images were pretty ordinary until I did a bit of post processing in Aperture. I mainly used the Curves adjustment to bring all the contrast levels back and restore some detail in the image.

While it's not a technically great photo, I sure learned a lot about shooting the moon.