December 23, 2011
Taking Photo of the Moon Using a Point-and-Shoot Camera (and some othe dirty tricks)
One night during the full moon, you stroll around the park and you notice a big bright beauty moon (with a Stanford Bunny look-a-likte on its surface) in the sky. Luckily, at that time you are taking your trusted Point-and-Shoot (PnS) digital camera with you. You turn on the camera, aim to the moon, and take the photo. You then check the taken photo. Disappointingly, the moon appears very bright unlike what you see with your own eyes :
A moon...or a sun ?
Yes, the moon is very bright ! You quickly rush home, and googling around. Some sites suggest you to set the camera to the manual mode, and then adjust the exposure amount to the lowest. You follow the advice, try again, but to no avail, the moon still appears too bright (but, in some cases might work, it depends on the type of your PnS camera). Sadly, you give up and decided try to move on.
But wait, don’t give up yet, because :
- You haven’t taken an arrow in the knee.
- There is one possible way without resorting to purchasing a DSLR camera
And, how is it ? It’s simple. Just enable the flash when you take the photo ! And, at last, you manage to take the photo of a moon (complete with the Stanford Bunny look-a-like) :
Now it works !
So, what happen ? It is simple, first, the reflection on the moon is still too bright for your camera even though you set the exposure to the lowest. Second, by enabling the flash, the PnS camera basically automatically adjusts its setting to the lowest senstitivity (such as reducing the shutter speed). After all, when the flash is enabled, in the usual condition such as taking photo in a room, the flash light will be very bright and the PnS camera has to compensate this by automatically reducing its sensitivity (e.g. reduce the shutter speed).
BTW, when you take the photo of the moon, don’t forget to set the focus to infinite and do optical zooming until the end.
Oh, what was the camera I used to take these photos ? It was Canon Powershot A2100 IS. Here are more photos I took using this little guy :
This Lunar Eclipse photo was taken on 10 December 2011. Since the moon was not as bright as usual, I took this photo by using long exposure (around 8 seconds). A tripod would be useful in this case.
Double Lightning. Lightning appears very brief, so it is hard to take the right moment to take its photo. Two possible ways to take this photo : (a) by using long exposure (b) by enabling continuous shots (i.e., by keep holding down the shutter button, the camera will keep taking photos). For this photo, I used the latter method.
So, what's so special about this photo. In this case, the light is very bright from the sky behind. So, when we took the photo in the usual way, my friend appeared very dark (After all, this camera cannot take HDR or RAW photo). So, to get around this, I just enabled the flash so that it can illuminate my friend. So, now you have learned two unorthodox ways of using flash : to take photo of the moon and to take photo in the daytime.
My eye, in close up. Love the iris ? Here's how to take the photo by my own. (1) set it to Macro mode (2) put it very near to my eye. (3) used another hand to hold the flashlight to illuminate from the side (4) put a mirror behind the camera, and used another eye to see the preview from the camera display through the mirror reflection.
Note that there exists a firmware hack for Canon PnS cameras called CHDK which enables us to have greater control on our Canon PnS cameras. Unfortunately, it is still not available yet for Canon Powershot A2100 IS. That’s why I relied on these tricks to take some of these photos.
So, that’s all folks for today. If you have any suggestions, comments, or interesting tricks for PnS digital camera, feel free to share in the comment.
BTW, if you want to use these photos somewhere else, please notify me first. Thanks !
