Enjoy.
-Ben
A technically correct moon exposure. Since the moon reflects most of the sun's light the exposure would be close to that of sunny sky. In this case we use the "Sunny 16" rule. The rule states that when photographing a clear blue sky use 1/film speed as the shutter speed. In this photo I used the "Sunny 16" rule which gave me an exposure of 1/200, f/16, ISO:200 While this is a nice photo, I felt it didn't represent what I saw and desired to capture.
Opened up the aperture by 2 stops and now we can see more of the foreground and background while retaining some detail in the moon. The sun was setting and the sky became a beautiful blue-purple color. This was a little better, but not quite what I wanted. The only solution was to slow down the shutter.
...And change the focus. Instead of looking at the moon as the subject I replaced it as the background and used the silhouettes of the tree branches for my foreground. I really liked the look of the photo and it was different, not something that I try to do when photographing the moon.
This was my personal favorite. This was the best photo that told the story of the evening. Calm, cool, and peaceful.
