infocus @ stillworx.com

A friend said to me “Take a picture of the moon..”

The first thought that went through my mind was, “I don’t have the right lenses for that.” But then I figured that this would be a good opportunity to see how much detail the 16 megapixels of the Nikon D7000 can capture. I put on the longest lens I had (the Tamron SP 90mm ƒ/2.8) and aimed for the moon. The first thing about photographing the moon is: don’t rely on the meter. Even with spot metering, the camera was overexposing the moon, appearing as a bright yellow disc with no detail. There was even a hint of purple fringing!

The spot metered settings were 1/160s at ƒ/2.8 (ISO 100). I stopped down a little to ƒ/5 and tried 1/250s. Still a little too bright. 1/320s at the same aperture value yielded the best result. The picture above is what the moon looked like from the viewfinder. A tiny speck. Not much to look at.

But take a look at the 100% crop below. There’s a fair amount of detail to be gleaned from the image.

So, with a little sharpening, we get this:

Not bad at all! I’m loving my D7000 more and more each day!