Shooting the Moon

I feel I am falling behind a little with keeping track of all my recent endeavors. While I complained a wee bit about living "in the goonies" due to my job situation, several things have fallen into place in my life as it is right now. My employment returns fair remuneration, enabling me to pursue a passtime that has intrigued me for ages: photography at amateur level. For the first time I feel adequately funded to purchase the equipment neccessary to take "stunning" shots. - I am well aware that most of the stunning comes from the person behind the lens, but without the technical gadgets certain things, such as photographing shy birds from a long distance, are simply out of reach. - So now that I have been a proud owner of a DSLR camera, I am pursuing yet another hobby of mine: traveling. Naturally, the two go very well together ... Several new posts are in development hell "as we speak", and I expect more to be on their way in the future!

Yet as to the photo equipment, I recently added my first extra piece of equipment to the kit I bought from a consumer electronics retail store. A "kit" in this respect means one obtains the "body" of a camera, plus one lens that typically satisfies everyday requirements. Such a lens covers the range from near "tele" (where you zoom in, like with binoculars) to mild "wide-angle" (the angle in quesion being the one away from the central line of view dead ahead from your eyes). After doing a little research, I discovered there are four general types of lenses: standard lenses (which are usually sold as kit lenses; i.e., they come as part of the camera package), wide-angle lenses (for tall buildings and wide landscapes), tele lenses (which are for zooming in on details in a distance), and macro lenses (for close-up photography of objects just in front of the camera).

I already had a kit consisting of a standard lens and the camera body, but recently I got my first tele lens. Labeling it the "first" means it does deliver a decent quality, but taking a full screen image of a bird that is several hundred meters still requires a better tier of tele zoom range, which will unfortulately add another digit to the price ... So, the first real try-out for my new gadget was a benchmark shot: the full moon. Indeed, if I were to zoom in such that the moon fills the entire camera screen, I would need an even better lens right away. But the combination of 18 Megapixels resolution and a readily available software allowed be to crop the dark sky and blow up the moon in accordance with the above description. A better lens would have dug out even more detail, but I'd like to remind you that both the tele lens and the camera are entry level, and also that the picture was shot out of my hand, without a tripod. Given the snapshot quality, I am quite amazed how much structure is revealed, especially at the border to the unilluminated side. (The photo was taken one week before the actual full moon.)

shooting the moon - facilitated by the proper gear

Given the satusfaction I am receiving from this passtime, I am planning on buying a wide-angle lens soon, so as to be prepared for my trip to the land of the highrises ... (The macro lens will have to wait, though.)