The new moon appears as a hanging crescent in the evening sky just after sunset, and soon follows the sun down over the western horizon.
This is one of my favourite times in the lunar cycle, as the sky around the moon still retains a lot of its colour and the view is very appealing.
However, there's no colour in this photo, unless I was to artificially replace the black background with something else, which I decided not to do in this case.
Where's the colour gone? After all, the sky looked a lovely shade of blue while I was taking the photo, so what's happened?
Well the moon is a lot brighter than you might think, and to take a picture of it that retains the surface detail that we want to see requires the same sort of exposure as you would use on a sunny day. A good starting point is F11, 1/125 second at ISO100.
Unfortunately at that sort of exposure the significantly darker sky gets grossly underexposed and turns virtually black, hence no blue.
It is possible to take two exposures, one for the moon and one for the sky and blend them together to retain both surface detail and colour, but trying to do this is tricky as the moon moves very quickly across the frame when viewed through a 400mm lens, and a lot of post processing effort is required to avoid ghosting around the moon.
In the end I decided to leave the background its natural black, which adds a certain mystery to the moon itself.
Filename - moon crescent 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 400mm
Exposure - 1/4sec @ f11, ISO100
Location - Sky above West Kirby
This image - 800x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Tripod, mirror lockup and cable release used to prevent camera shake
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