moon

i hand held this with my camera then cropped it in photoshop. what

do you think?

I think it's not bad for being handheld but you've got some technical issues/decisions that could be improved.  It's obviously a little soft and definitely over-exposed.  My personal preference is to under-expose slightly. You shot this in "P" and your camera chose a shutter speed of 1/125 sec. @ f/5.6, ISO 200.  Because of all the blackness, it's not uncommon for your camera to meter a lot of that black and try to compensate, over-exposing the bright light in the middle. 300mm is more than sufficient to render good detail in the Lunar surface but you need to mess with your settings a bit and use a tripod or lay/lean on something and steady your hands.

For this shot (and this Moon phase), I would recommend 1/250 @ f/8 ISO 400 as a starting point.  That would reduce your exposure by one stop, reduce camera shake by speeding up your shutter speed, and produce a sharper, more detailed image due to the smaller aperture.  Just set your D300 to manual mode, dial in those settings and give it a try.  I look forward to seeing your progress.

Hi Scott,

You have received some good exposure advise from Jeff. However, I have to correct Jeff in that the sharpest image results from using the lens wide open (not stopped down), unless the lens is not a good one.

I would continue that the sharpness issue is directly related to the focus.

It is not easy for any lens to auto focus on the moon, so manually focusing the lens is a better way to proceed.

The F-stop should be wide open ( like F/4). However, the details did not tell which 300mm lens you were using. If ot was a zoom, most go to 300mm at F/5.6, while fixed focal length lens (better for this work) are F/4 or F/2.8 from Nikon.

 Best Regards,  Mike

Under most circumstances I would acquiesce to the more experienced and educated Mike but in this case, I've got to disagree with his assertion that shooting wide open will create the sharpest image.  This may be true for larger aperture telephotos but for multi-element telephoto zooms, it's not.

But don't just take my word for it.  I made you a little demonstration ;) 

The following images were all taken tethered to prevent having to touch the camera between shots, using a Canon 40D, Canon EF100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS piggy-backed on a Celestron CG-9 1/4 which was mounted to a Losmandy G-9 equatorial mount.  I used Live View (and thus, mirror lock-up) and manual focus (10x in Live View) on all images and IS was turned off.  Each image was cropped to 100% and then enlarged 100% so the images are 200% original size.  All three images were processed identically.

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r34/F1Addict/IMG_4334_crop.jpg 

^^1/500th second @ f/5.6 ISO 400^^

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r34/F1Addict/IMG_4335_crop.jpg

^^1/250th second @ f/8 ISO 400^^

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r34/F1Addict/IMG_4336_crop.jpg

^^1/125th second @ f/11 ISO 400^^

The highest resolving power of most any photographic lens is between one and two stops down from wide-open.

i really like your comments and thankyou for you great advise. i think both of your portfolios are wonderful and appreciate your honest and sincere advice.

thankyou.