If you're thinking moon photography is some complicated process that requires fancy equipment, you'd be surprised. It's actually quite easy to start, even with a basic camera set.
The first question most people ask is what's the best lens for photographing the moon? The longer the focal length, the better. What you're looking for is as much magnification as you can get to capture those beautiful textures of the moon's surface. If you can rent, borrow or buy a 600mm lens, that'd be great. However, 200mm is enough to start with, and you can crop digitally after the fact to simulate further zoom.
What's the best camera for moon photography? Most interchangeable lens cameras as of 2024, even going back a couple of generations, are just fine for moon photography. You could even use a camera going back to about 2010. Some superzoom compact cameras like the Nikon P1000 are also popular for moon photography.
Whatever camera you have, put your longest lens on. This might be a kit 55-200mm, a fancier 70-200mm 2.8, a third party 18-400mm, or a longer native lens like the Nikon 180-600, Sony 200-600, or Canon 100-500mm. It may be easier to find the moon starting at a wider focal length and then, once you find the moon, zoom all the way in for the most magnification.
I always photograph the moon in manual exposure mode, which enables me to set my shutter speed, aperture and ISO manually. This is because the amount of light falling on the moon will be the same for the duration of your shoot, and if the brightness is the same, the exposure settings can be fixed.
To start with, for an average moon, dial in ISO 1000, shutter speed 1/500, and the widest aperture (lowest f-number) you can get. On a basic camera set, you might get a wide aperture of f/6.3, for example. Why those aperture and shutter speed settings? A wide aperture lets in the greatest volume of light, which supports a shutter speed of 1/500 to freeze any camera shake. For a brighter super moon, I've shot at ISOs as low as 100.
You don't need to understand exposure if you start with my basic settings and then vary them as needed. However, for a quick overview, remember my faucet analogy: letting light into the camera is like filling a cup from a faucet. A faucet has a knob for turning the flow on, controlling the volume of water, and then turning the flow off. A camera works basicaly the same way. The wider the aperture, the greater the volume of light, and the less time you need to fill the sensor with for your desired brightness. If your shutter speed is at 1/500, and your aperture is open to its widest, the last setting is whatever ISO gives you a good brightness in your test shot.
To check exposure (brightness), turn on the highlight warning in your camera's playback menu. White areas of the picture will blink during playback if they're blown out. A quick way to set good exposure is to adjust your settings, in this case ISO, until the highlights start blinking, and then go one notch darker.
That's the basics! Just go out on the next clear night and if the moon is one you want to photograph, start with these settings and go for it!
5 Moon Photography Tips
1. Sensor Sizes
I won't go into the full explanation, but the camera's sensor, and crop mode, can affect the apparent magnification of the image. If you already have a crop sensor camera, like a Nikon D5600, Sony a6400, or Canon T7 or 90D, you'll get the equivalent field of view of 1.5 to 1.6 times the focal length of your lens. For example, if you have a 200mm lens, it's as if you're looking through a 300mm lens.
Likewise if you have a full-frame camera like the Nikon Z8, D850, Canon 5DIV or R6, or Sony a7IV, and shoot in crop mode, you also get the equivalent view of 1.5 times the focal length of your lens (1.6 for Canon). Again, if you have a 200mm lens, it'll look like you're viewing through a 300mm lens. And if you turn crop mode on and off, you can get a feel for the difference in effective magnification.
Now, when shooting in crop mode on a full-frame camera, you also reduce your total resolution by a bit more than half, which is why I would only shoot crop mode on a high-resolution camera, like the Nikon Z7 or Canon R5II. On a crop sensor camera, shooting normally, you automatically get the crop magnification effect without losing resolution.
2. Let it Rise
Initially, I would photograph beautiful, bright full moons, only to get back and see that my images were all slightly blurry, no matter what technique I used. This is because when the moon is relatively low on the horizon, you're shooting through a lot of atmosphere (heat, moisture, pollution), which causes distortion. Let the moon get higher in the sky, so you're pointing your lens more up to space than toward the horizon, and there will be less atmosphere to shoot through, and you'll get crisp images.
3. Side Lighting
The direction of light matters a lot for interesting moon photography, as I would argue it does for any photograph. Specifically, when lit from the side, a partial moon will have more texture as the sun creates shadows that define craters and surface textures.
You need light and shadow to create contrast, form and shape. When the moon is full, the lighting is very flat, which makes the textures hard to see, to the point the moon can even look blurry.
4. Focus Mode
The moon is relatively stationary as a subject, so the sharpest focus mode is single servo, or AF-S. That means when you press the shutter button halfway, the camera will focus once and then hold, which is usually the most accurate method of focus. You can manually focus, but there's no need to. I set my frame rate to continuous advance (4-5 fps is plenty fast) and shoot a burst of 2-3 frames at a time.
5. Shoot Raw
Shooting raw is a bit more advanced for someone just getting into photography in general, so I won't say you must do it. Basically it's a file format that you can set in the camera that records all of the information from the sensor, preserving a lot more detail, such as brightness and color information, to pull out using a raw editor like Adobe Lightroom. It enables you to fine tune the results and extract color and texture, for example, that isn't readily visible in the captured image but is still recorded. It's a tad more technical to explain all of that now, but if you'd like to learn more about raw vs. JPEG, I have an article for that!
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