These are so cool!
Question from a newbie/wanna-be photographer: How do you take such good (close-up) photos of the moon?
I have a Canon T3i that I'm still learning (my first DSLR). I tried but my photos all came out blurry.
Thanks for your help!
While mine aren't nearly as good as some others (I didn't bother trying that hard, since full moons don't really interest me, especially since I forgot around twilight and went out at full dark, so there was no context to them, and insert some other excuses here!) there are a few methods that I used on my T1i to get it set up.
First, manual exposure. Your TTL metering is going to blow out the moon since it's so much brighter than the rest of the sky (especially in the full dark shots). I started with 1/125s (as was noted in this thread) at the "doesn't matter" apertures of f/11 and f/16. I then manually bracketed by adjusting the shutter speed up and down.
Second, focusing. I mixed using AF and MF and did find that AF worked just fine (I only use the center focusing point on my camera, I can't get used to it focusing off center since I've been doing the focus and compose thing for ~15 years
), but the MF photos for others (who can see worth a damn, unlike me) may come out a tinge sharper.
Last, is long lens + tripod. I skipped the tripod (see the aforementioned not really trying remark), but using one will increase the sharpness of your photos, even at 1/125s (usually they suggest to turn IS off when using a tripod too, not sure why, but I'll blindly follow that advice
). The long lens is crucial to get in tight since the moon is a small object in a large sky. I wish I had longer lenses for this type of thing as my 250mm didn't get that close, but such is life (my wallet thanks me for not getting one too
).
Post-Last is my own personal method as pulled from random First-Person Shooter games.... "Spray and Pray". Since my eyesight is bad, I can't always tell a good shot from a not-so-good shot on the camera (or even in the viewfinder!) so I take a lot at once and can the bad ones back home. Hence my ~15-20% keeper rate on photos (and an even lower rate on actual strong photos). It works for me and is the primary reason I went 32GB cards instead of smaller ones
. You'd also be surprised at how you can improve some less than stellar shots via post processing. (I took roughly 20-25 shots in about a 5 minute period for my supermoon shots, before the clouds rolled in...)
I'm sure some of the other, actual good, photographers around here will add and modify this, but that's how I got the moon shots that I did.
(at least for me...handheld). It's fairly cloudy here, and there were some nice thin clouds in front of it, but I couldn't expose for both the moon and the clouds at all 
