F stops and F bombs and the Man in the Moon

I've come to refer to F stops as F bombs. Why? Because they are beginning to drive me crazy so I occasionally drop several F bombs while trying to get that oh so perfect shot that always seems to be just out of my reach. Trying to master the perfect ISO, aperature value, white balance, distance, angle etc etc etc is begining to turn me into a mad woman. Of course I have a few select family members that are rolling their eyes saying to their computer screen, "I don't think you're a mad woman, I KNOW you're a mad woman!"

Anyway, I've been trying to shoot our full moon for 3 days now and today I finally figured out that I've been going about it all wrong. I've been setting my camera up to shoot night shots and the moon is a big fat bright light (reflection from the sun). Duh. First, I set my camera to single focus and took it out to infinety. What that means is whatever I focus the tiny dot in the center of the lense on and anything else that is exactly the same distance away is the only thing that focuses in the picture. Next, I set my 75x300 lense on the longest focal length it had, basically I got as close to the moon as I could. I could only see the moon, the whole moon and nothing but the moon. Now, since my hand is not as steady as it used to be I set my camera up on the tripot and set my timer to a 10 second delay. This way the camera isn't swaying around while I'm trying to hold it steady and when I push the shutter it won't take the picture until after the camera is stabelized. Brilliant right? Then, here is the tricky part, expose for the moon and not for the black sky. THIS is the main thing that has caused me so much grief lately. All this time I was using my widest aperture setting, the slowest possible shutter speed to let enough light in, and a high ISO setting. All of my shots looked overexposed and the moon was blurry, partely because I was letting way too much light in and partley because believe it or not, my shutter was open for so long that the moon actually MOOVED before it closed.

So, here's what I finally ended up with:


Imagine my sheer and utter delight when I dowloaded this shot, you can see all of the craters and I do believe the man in the moon is winking at me! This is what I had my camera set at shutter speed of 1/500, aperture setting of 4.0, and ISO setting of 800. I tried the ISO at 200, 400 and 600 but in each one the moon was either too dark or yellow any higher and it had the over exposed blur effect which although can sometimes be cool, but it just wasn't what I was after, 800 was the magic number. With just a little sharpening in Photoshop I finally jumped over the moon!