Moonlight photography testing – new lens

I have bought a new lens, primarily for night-time and panoramic photography, so I took it out during a full moon just to try it out:

basic exposure by moonlight

This is the basic exposure by moonlight before any adjustments. – I took this to see how well the LED garden lights were showing,  the overall brightness of the image (this was 1/30 sec at f2.8 at 400ISO). The only way to get the image brighter would be to increase the ISO, or change to bulb mode to get an exposure of 60 seconds or more.

But, so far so good.

Next I included the cottage with some lights on to see the effect this had:

basic cottage by moonlight

This is a basic exposure but the brilliance of the house lighting does overpower the moonlight, but it does show that it was taken when it was quite dark! There was, however, no detail in the windows, so I took a series of exposures at lower exposures and merged them to get this:

cottage by moonlight hdr

You can see some detail in the door window (the other window had a blind down so there is not detail to show). I did try various settings to try and get an image that looked as though it was taken at night – getting the balance right wasn’t easy (I am not sure this is the best) but I wanted to show detail in the garden.

More work is needed!

Author: Paul L.G. Morris

I am an amateur photographer whose photography is mostly of gardens, nature and the rural environment. My specialities are close-ups, panoramic views, or a combination of both that I call 'Nearscapes'. I work mostly for my own interest having closed my business PM Studios Ltd.