Project 27 - By the light of the Moon

I seemed to wait for ever for a combination of a clear sky and a full moon which were necessary prerequisites for this exercise. However last night my opportunity arose and so I took the images shown above. All were taken in my garden which fortunately is not affected by extraneous lighting.

All three were taken with the camera on a tripod with a wireless remote control fitted to avoid any camera shake with the necessarily long exposure time of 20 seconds. All three were shot with the aperture set at f3.5 which is the widest aperture available on the lens used (Tamron 28 - 300mm) with a setting of 28mm.

It was a clear night with a full moon and the images were shot at approximately 2215 hours on Wednesday 1st August.

With the camera set to manual the only changes made was to the ISO (100 for the first; 200 for the second and 400 for the third image.

I then turned the camera round to take the following three images:

The same camera set up was used although the images from top to bottom have ISO settings of 400; 200 and 100.

I had looked at a number of pages of information on the Internet to make a preliminary calculation of the shutter speed and used the average of 20 seconds. I checked the initial image and found the result acceptable for the purpose of the experiment and stuck with the 20 seconds throughout.

The first set that is obviously looking away from the house were a surprise to me particularly the ISO 400 shot that clearly has colour information. The shadows that can be seen are moon shadows and the lighting of the area is solely the effect of the moon. As is stated in the Course material our eyes do not see colour in such situations and yet obviously the camera's sensors capture the colour elements albeit somewhat muted. In Photoshop I did move the Exposure slider to increase the level and it became almost like a summer's day!

The reason for turning the camera round was to catch the effect of the moonlight on the house. To me, although my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, the house looked dark with the only obvious light being from the Garden lights. The nearest image to what I was 'seeing' was the ISO 100 image and even then there is more light than I was conscious of. In the ISO 400 version the amount of light was totally unexpected and the change in the colour of the sky was equally a surprise. The smudge of light left of centre in the picture just above the horizon at that point is a plane coming in to land at Stansted that is probably 30 miles away.