Late last year I picked up a new Sony 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 lens and the full moon on the morning of January 12th screamed to be captured. It was about 7:30 in the morning and I went out with my tripod, new lens, camera and coffee to set up for a few shots.
This was the first real chance I got to use the new glass, so I took a couple throwaway shots and then grabbed a dozen 3 exposure brackets of the Full Moon at different focal lengths, settling on this group at 600mm. I think I am going to need to look into some teleconverters for this lens to stretch it even further.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining;
Anton Chekhov
show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
After finishing my coffee and warming up, I promptly, and completely forgot about the images I captured on the camera’s SD Card. A couple days ago, I sat down and copied the images from the card to my library and kicked myself in the ass, remembering about these captures. I killed off most of them, but this bracket (+/- 2, 0 EV) survived the culling.
These were imported into On1 Photo RAW and HDR merged with manual settings to bring out the definition of the surface of the Full Moon, and then a bit of dynamic contrast and color correction was done … thats about it.
I am quite pleased with the way it came out, especially for a test shoot with a new lens. Things I have to remember (other than not forgetting about taking the shots) are to let the lens acclimate to the cold before shooting, bring weights to stabilize the tripod and you can never have enough coffee on a cold January morning. For those who like to geek out on this stuff, the EXIF data for this photo is below.
Image EXIF data:
- Aperture: ƒ/6.3
- Camera: ILCE-7RM2
- Copyright: ©2020 John P. Hoke
- Focal length: 600mm
- ISO: 100
- Title: Full Moon on Sunday
