The Moon

Taken on a Nikon D7000 with an 18-200mm lens

So I decided to take this picture because the moon looked really neat last night. When I stepped outside the moon was surrounded with clouds that appeared to have a smokey look to it. When I grabbed my camera, I wanted to capture something different from how any other person would take a picture of the moon.

In this photo, I had my camera settings as followed:

Aperture: f/5.6

Shutter: 1/10

ISO: 2000

White Balance: Incandescent

Focal Length: 200mm

I chose to have an aperture of f/5.6 and an ISO of 2000 to allow for my camera to let in more light. The reason I chose 1/10^th of a second was because I did not want an exposure that was so long that it would make the moon look completely blown out. In the other sense, I did not want an exposure so short that the rest of the photo went completely black. I wanted to capture the brightness of the moon as well as the light coming off the moon in the sky. I left my white balance on Incandescent simply to get a different outcome in colour temperature then if I were to have had my settings on Cloudy or Auto white balance. The grain that has been added to the photo as due to my high levels of ISO helping to add the final touches to the photograph.

In the foreground you see tree branches. I chose to put the tree branches in the photograph because it made the photo more interesting to look at then just a shot of the moon. Due to having the tree branches in the foreground, I did not mind putting the moon in the centre of the photograph. Normally, I would not centre and object because it is to plain and boring in my opinion, but the branches changed the outcome of the photograph.

The only Photoshop that was done to this photograph was cropping it to a square sized image.