It’s Nice to Have a Moon, photo by Harold Davis.

I saw this wonderful moon rising over the Berkeley hills out the porch on our top-floor bedroom. The longest telephoto I had around was an old manual Nikon 300mm lens, so I got it out, and put it on my D70 with a tripod of course.

Exposure was pretty much guessing. Try as you like with the moon, you tend to overexpose the moon area if you pay any attention to what a camera’s meter is saying (because the surrounding areas are so dark). A spot meter would help with this problem but I didn’t have mine handy.

The camera was in manual exposure mode, of course, with the old lens, and I had the aperture set at f/8.

I took about a dozen exposures, this was the best (and shortest) at 1/30 of a second.

In Photoshop I cropped in a bit more and added a little color using a separate layer with a radial gradient (with layer opacity set to 18% and the blending mode was set to color burn). This may be more than you wanted to know!

It’s always nice to have a moon around. The moon is romantic, and it can be trotted out when you are in the mood. A nice moon can also be saved for later, and used in photo compositions (which is what I will do with this one when the right occasion arises).