Lens: Sigma 400mm f5.6
Camera: NEX-7, ISO200, f11, 1/4, monochrome + HDR6ev
I am not a moon-shooting person. At least, I wasn’t. However I love the night sky, I can name few constellations, and when I was in high-school all I wanted was to work for NASA and spend my life looking at the sky through a huge telescopes. One summer my father bought us a small and cheap telescope with which we had a lot of fun watching the moon during summer nights. And, hey, I did not end up working for NASA, but I managed to spend a couple of years at ESA (the European Space Agency). Anyway, the story here is that shooting the moon is something I found to actually enjoy and maybe I’ll buy another small and cheap telescope to attach to my gear. Maybe in the future. So: I turned out to be a moon-shooting person, afterall.
What I did here was to use a crappy Sigma 400mm f5.6 that I’ve got for free (!) by the guy who sold me the Minolta 100mm f2.8 macro this summer. The lens has some issue with the hood, somehow fixed by the previous owner with a generous handful of silver tape. The APS-C sensor of the NEX-7 makes it a 600mm equivalent and the 24Mpx leave space for some serious cropping (i.e., digital zooming) so it woks well enough to get a view of the full moon with all its seas and craters. Getting the tiny layer of clouds together with the moon required an extra bit of technique: a tripod to keep the moon in the same spot and the camera HDR program set on its maximum exposure range of six full stops. Here it is, some moody moon-shot…