D700 – Hand Held Moon

Every once in a while, I get the urge to shoot an image of the moon. However, since reshaping my camera equipment more towards high end equipment, I no longer have the ideal equipment for shooting the moon. The 300mm F4 AFS and TC17e teleconverter are gone, so I am now left with just the 70-300VR consumer grade zoom.

Now, that’s a very nice zoom and is often used when shooting with the full frame D700 because it is extremely sharp within the 70-200 range, and acceptably sharp at 300.

So I thought I’d see what the D700 could do with this lens and hand held. I set the exposure in manual mode to 1/250s at F11 and ISO 400. F11 is the best sharpness point of the 70-300VR lens at 300mm, and 400 ISO is as clean on the D700 as 100 ISO on the D300.

I shot in high speed mode and blasted off a dozen images or thereabouts. The results were mediocre, and pretty small since the full frame puts fewer pixels on the image than does the APS-C frame in the D300 at the same magnification.

And here is that moon at pretty much 100% magnification … lots of processing was required to pull out this much detail …