Night Shooting Tips

[01CamaroF1WRC]

Hey guys,

I got a Canon XTi with the standard 18-55 lens it came with. I got a Canon 75-300 lens, Canon Deluxe Tripod, and Sandisk 4GB Extreme III CF card for my first SLR.

I am looking to take some night shots tonight and tomorrow of the full moon outside. It looks bigger than normal and has a cool color to it tonight. I was gonna mount the XTi to my tripod and use the 75-300mm for it. Any kind of setting I should play around with to get an object like the moon in my shot? I know my camera has a landscape mode.

This camera is still new to me. It's got a lot more buttons than my Canon S500 that I still have to mess around with.

[garrettej8]

put the camera in manual mode. change the aperture to about 10 and set the shutter to 1/125" and play with it from there. also make sure you are focusing correctly, give manual focus a shot.

[TROLL]

if you dont understand manual exposure yet then it may be a little difficult to really perfect your shot, but a semi-simple way i would recommend would be:

set your ISO to 400. put your camera on sports or action mode. this will give you the highest shutter speed available to you. put the camera on the tripod, compose the shot how you want it, focus on the moon with either autofocus if it works or manually, and press the shutter down halfway to see what your exposure is going to be. if the shutter speed is higher than 1/125th of a second, that should be good to freeze the movement of the moon and get a crisp shot. if the shutter speed is lower than that, go back into your ISO and raise it to 800 or something similar. recheck your exposure and hopefully it should be good at this point.
put the camera on self timer (a delay of 2 seconds is plenty, but 5 works too) to avoid shake from your hand on the camera when you're pressing the shutter. take some photos and check to see if they look good. if they look too bright or too dark, adjust your exposure by going +1 or -1 or whatever it needs to look good.

thats not exactly how i would shoot it but its probably the best way for you to get into it if you're still kind of new to the camera.

[lagos]

great tips.

what about shooting hand held at night? im having a hard time finding the right settings without creating too much blur.

[TROLL]

thats because its not possible in most situations. a rough rule of thumb is:

to handhold a camera, for a focal length X of the lens you're shooting, your shutter speed needs to be 1/X or faster.

that means for a 50mm lens you need to be shooting at or faster than 1/50th of a second, and for a 200mm lens you need to be shooting at 1/200th of a second. faster is better, but if you can hold pretty steady that rule of thumb works.

if there's just not enough light to get those shutter speeds then you can turn to a flash or tripod depending on the situation.