helppppppp!!!!!

[daine042 (Daine)]

i saw there was a few people on this section so ill post here not really an image YET but i do need some help to get one of the moon tonight was wondering what settings ill need for my camera got a nikon d90 and a couple choices of lens both tamron the first is a 70-300mm and the other is my 180mm f3.5 macro the 2nd of the 2 is a little better but id need to do a bit of cropping to get the size i want ive tried with the 70-300 iso 1000 f22 1/500 exposure but im struggling with the clarity any ideas?

[Garbz (Chris)]

Sorry for the late reply, but for next time here's a few tips for photography in general.

ISO1000 f/22 1/500 is pushing all your settings to the worst possible place. On your camera diffraction starts to dramatically reduce sharpness of your images above typically f/11, so if you're after quality that's as high as you would typically go. Some lenses have a diffraction limited sharpness even larger than this and may be sharpest at f/8 or even wider.

If you take your aperture down you also get your ISO down. The camera quality is best at native ISO. I think that's 200 for the D90. You could set your camera to f/10 ISO200 1/500th and get the same exposure with a dramatically improved image.

Also your ability to hold still the camera depends on technique but as a general rule of thumb you can get sharp images if you set your shutter speed faster than 1/(equivalent 35mm focal length). For 300mm on your lens that would be 1/(300*1.5) for the D90 or 1/450 so you got this setting right. Naturally with image stabilisation you can go for slower shutter speeds.