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Gator5000e

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 27, 2018
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I have to say I'm disappointed in the night photos I am trying to take of this beautiful super moon. In some shots the background is blurry and out of focus. This is not intentional. And in all of the the beautiful orange tinted moon is nothing but a blooming ball of light. You have no idea what it is. Maybe my expectations are too high but I was hoping for more out of this phone. I am posting a few and would love thoughts. Maybe I’m doing something wrong.
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The moon is actually much brighter than most people realise. As it’s so small in the frame the auto exposure adjusts for the whole frame, making the moon just a white dot.

I have a photo of the moon taken on a camera and correctly exposed, at F11, 500th Sec, ISO 800.

Try taking another shot, adjusting the exposure to make the whole photo a lot darker and you might get the details back on the moon’s surface.
 
you won't really get great moon shots until we see more zoom or if like the rumoured mode for photos like this which may be coming soon.
 
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The moon is a whole lot brighter than you think. Particularly a full moon in a dark sky. Without a separate lens attachment or sometimes thru a binocular, you won’t get a halfway decent shot on any basic phone camera.
 
Do not use auto. Download a camera app that allows manual setting. An auto algorithm will look at the majority dark sky and try to boost exposure.
 
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There's two issues here.

1) The lenses on the iPhone aren't long enough to shoot the moon as a primary subject. You typically use much longer lenses to do this, 200 mm minimum I'd say, but even better with 300 mm, 400 mm or more. The 2x lens on the iPhone is ~ 52 mm equivalent, but the iPhone rarely uses it in low light conditions, instead just cropping the 1x lens to 2x (because the 2x lens and sensor are much lower quality). So without the long lens, you wouldn't be able to see the details you want to see. I guess one of the only widely available phones to be able to do this would be the Samsung S21 Ultra.

2) As many others have said, the moon is bright, and you need to expose for it. If you have a long lens as described above, it'll already be closer to a good exposure. This is because exposure on cameras is usually just determined by the average of the scene. If most of it is dark, and the moon is small, the moon will be blown out (a bright spot with no detail). If you were to do this with something like the Samsung S21 Ultra, you'd still be best served by a pro mode or app, and the best image would be on a tripod with a longer exposure.
 
Low pixel and zoom. For this extreme conditions you need a proper cam.

This was shot this spring hand held with a 8year old Sony Nex 6 (16MP and 200mm 25 year old glass with adapter) costing 1/3 of the 12 pro max

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I used the ProCamera app with manual settings and this is the best my 12 Pro could do shooting from my hand.

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Many new phones have a moon mode, but they basically paste a picture of the moon on top of the real thing. That’s just too fake for my taste.

Like it was said before, the moon is too bright and the lens and sensor of the iPhone is too small.
 
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