About Photography

The sky was clear and crisp last night and the waxing gibbous moon was sharply outlined.  I wanted a really tight shot of the moon to combine with other backgrounds. This requires a focal length close to 2000mm.  I tried a variety of combinations of lenses and telextenders, but the final image below was made with a very inexpensive 1300mm lens by Samyang.  The optical quality of this lens is what you would expect from such an inexpensive product.  Nonetheless, it was good enough to achieve a tight shot that I was able to clean up and enhance later in post-processing.

This super-telephoto image of the moon was super-imposed over a wide angle shot I had of the Milky Way.  The moon photo was taken with a Nikon D800 set to 1.2x crop mode, which effectively increased the 1300mm focal length to 1560mm.  Exposure was 1/160sec. at an ISO of 400.