What happened was, we came home late and there was that Supermoon beaming through the trees. So I screwed the big ol’ 400mm Tokina onto the Fujifilm camera and got a pretty decent picture even though there was quite a bit of haze. It’s so much easier when you’re not using an SLR.
I’ve done this before, with a 2007-vintage Pentax DSLR and a zoom stretched to 210mm. But it was hard, involving guesswork; and a lot of Lightrooming.
With an EVF it’s just no pain. Since I don’t have a tripod mount for the big lens, I decided I better shoot pretty fast. But I didn’t want the ISO-6400 grain. And I suspected that F8 was the lens’s best aperture.
Then the rest was easy. Because I was using an EVF. As in Electronic Viewfinder. As in, it shows you what the sensor is recording (well, to be exact, I’m pretty sure it shows you the JPEG the camera would generate; close enough). So I put the aperture at F8 and the max-ISO at 1600 and cranked the shutter speed up, looking through the viewfinder till I was seeing a nice palette of greys and nothing looked blown-out. I ended up at 1/1000sec, which I never would have guessed at.
Why would anyone use any other kind of viewfinder?
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Pete Bergstrom (Aug 10 2014, at 20:29)
Keep the sunny 16 rule in mind: f16 @ 1/ISO for daylight, which certainly the moon has on a clear night.
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From: Nelson (Aug 12 2014, at 16:16)
Moonlight is bright, but not quite that bright. For shooting the moon directly it's the "Looney 11 rule": f/11, then exposure of 1/ISO seconds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looney_11_rule
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From: Gordon Haff (Aug 13 2014, at 04:30)
Nelson,
I suspect that the reason for the difference is that the moon is darker than an 18% gray card. (I couldn't find its reflectivity expressed in those terms but its surface is relatively dark.) So to look "right," you need to overexpose it a bit relative to an average scene on earth in sunlight.
To Tim's broader point, I really like my mirrorless camera. I don't use it for everything; my Canon DSLR has more lens variety and it's far more capable for shooting action. But it's what I usually use unless I have a particular need for my DSLR.
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From: Herve5 (Aug 17 2014, at 05:04)
It seems this post is searching for SLR reactions, so let's have one: are there really SLRs that don't feature EVFs at this moment? (apart they are called 'live view' or things like that…)
;-)
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From: John Cowan (Aug 25 2014, at 08:42)
The moon's albedo (percentage of light it reflects) is 7% averaged over the whole surface.
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