The moon is pretty big tonight in my area, so I thought that it will be a good idea to try to take some photos of it. Frankly speaking it isn't the best idea to shoot photos of something like the moon with a phone without very high end camera features (it's not the first time I tried that so I know the pain pretty well), but it's fun trying nevertheless.
Plus, I think I actually got something this time. Finally not just a torchlight in the sky.
(Just for references, my phone is a Huawei Nova 2i, aka the Huawei Mate 10 Lite in certain regions. Low-mid/Mid range smartphone that works okay-ish for me.)
I know, that is not even close to big, but that's literally the biggest zoom my phone can give. I guess it can look better if there exists some equipment like external zooming lens that works for every single phone out there, though. The moon wasn't that red too, but my choice of white balance value made it look like a blood moon. I picked something extremely warm (even warmer than the default value for sunsets) and that's what it turned out to be...lol.
The past attempts of taking photos like these ended up with a very noisy photo or a poorly coloured image and I guess I figured out why. The phone tends to set higher ISO values automatically when it's in a dark place, and it will automatically result in noisy photos and rarely helps too much if the subject is not moving. Giving the camera a longer exposure time will still give the photo brightness, but less noise instead. The photo above is actually captured with the lowest ISO value possible (50) but with a shutter speed of 1/30s. The phone will probably try to shoot it with an ISO value of 3200 if I don't set it manually in the professional mode, so I guess that's when the mode comes in handy. Even the Night Shot mode gives me a noisy photo with a light bulb in the sky instead of a moon...yeah, some times it's indeed better to do things manually if you know how.
I actually did more than 10 shots but I don't think you'll be interested in looking at the same thing over and over again, so I'll just pick out the ones that I think are better :P
This is an attempt to find a suitable shutter speed and I decided to use 1/4s...nice light bulb in the sky. I also chose another white balance closer to daylight so that I don't accidentally produce another blood moon. Got the colour pretty close, but too bright.
Same ISO, 1/40s shutter speed like the first, but with a colder white balance value and spot metering instead of matrix metering. To be honest, I never knew what those metering stuff meant, but a little researching (which is done after shooting the photos) showed the differences pretty well. So, I actually did a randomly good choice of using spot metering, :) there's a reason the final result turns out to be brighter!
This one turns out to my favourite. Same ISO, same metering mode, but 1/20s shutter speed instead. I got it reasonably bright (with some subtle glow around if you look at it in a dark place) with some patterns on the moon's surface visible, and I'm quite happy with it. Would definitely like it more if the moon is big enough but that's the best I can get, I guess.
I actually never expected myself to learn something about photography by just trying to capture some photos, it's indeed true that every moment is a learning opportunity :) Feel free to try it yourself too. P/s: Try to hold the phone dead steady when using long exposure times, even the slightest shake can turn your whole photo into a pile of spaghetti!
That's all for now, see you next time!
--Lilacse