Tonight I took some photos of the moon.

I used my Hasselblad with a Phase One H25, 22MP digital back tethered to a Mac laptop (running Capture One, which is needed for the Phase One tethered backs), and both a 250mm and 350mm lens with a 2x teleconverter. I had the camera on a tripod, and used mirror lockup and a cable release.

I use my spot meter to take a reading off the moon, and the 1 degree spot covered the moon nicely. The reading was 1/30 sec, f/8.5 at ISO-50. I chose an aperture of around f/8 because I wanted to use the aperture where the lens is considered to be at its sharpest.

You can see from the image above how much of the frame was occupied by the moon, with the 350mm lens and 2X teleconverter.

I took a bunch of shots at different exposures around the metered setting. I mostly shot meter as read, rather than over exposing by a stop or two (to make the moon whiter rather than middle grey), as I could see from the images in Capture One on the laptop that over exposing started to flare the moonlight a little too much, and thus you lost some of the contrast and darker tonal values.

Interestingly, focusing at infinity was not the sharpest. Just slightly back from infinity produced the sharper images. As such, it was actually quite hard to focus, as all you have through the viewfinder is a bright white blob with some fuzzy grey patches.

I then exported the images as 133MB tiff’s from Capture One, imported them into Lightroom, and played with the contrast, black and white points, and sharpening.

And, here are the results (click on the images to see a larger view):