The Moon

This image is not as sharp as the raw file owing to the image size limitation.

I used the EF 500mm F4 L lens with 1.4X and 2X multipliers in tandem

which with the 70D crop factor yielded a 2000mm equivalent. The image

filled the sensor. Of immense help was the digital 10X loop of the EOS 70D

in live view mode. Any thoughts please? I'm thinking of a shot at Saturn's

moons sometime.

great..8

Tony,

There is a good range of tones, and good contrast.  It looks pretty sharp to me.  What seems a little odd is the overall appearance - I'm used to seeing more texture on the moon, and this looks too smooth.  Maybe the size limitation causes some loss in resolution, but what I'm seeing is not so much loss of sharpness as it is smoothing and loss of texture.  Of course, the full moon is front-lighted and there isn't much contrast, but I've seen other similar shots that have more texture.  I'm not sure what could have produced this, although it reminds me of the look I get when I overdo noise reduction.  Did you shoot it with the lens wide open?  Would it be possible to shoot at a lower ISO?  Did you do any noise reduction or some other processing that could have taken away some texture?  Did you use image stabilization?  Lots of questions, but I'm curious about your technique.

Mark

Mark,

thanks for your interesting comments. There is of course a huge loss of information in scaling down the image to just 1500 pixels on the longest side. That being said, you are right about the smoothing. Shooting at ISO 6400 tends to invoke some loss of detail since I had high ISO noise reduction switched ON. It is an experiment I will repeat in the future, on a warm Summer night! I did not have image stabilization on, or at least it was not necessary (I don't remember) The focussing was done in manual mode using the 10X digital loop of the EOS 70D in live view mode. Also I used the touch shutter release of the 70D (you touch the LCD screen and it focusses at the point of touch - truly amazing) and in addition I had the shutter release delayed with a 3 second time delay to prevent any mechanical shaking due to the light touch on the screen. The aperture was small, F25, and the shutter speed 1/1000 sec. I did take other photos at lower ISO which showed more texture - but at slower shutter speed and not so sharp. Developing the photo is quite a challenge in attempting to bring out the detail given the high dynamic range. This is a learning process for me.