How would you take this photo your oppinion needed

who_dat73

Member
Ok my fellow photogs I want to take a photo of some train cars with the full moon in the background I am shooting with a Canon Rebel XT 28 to 200 lens and I am still pretty new to taking photos with the creative settings so go easy on the techno jargon LOL.
I messed around taking photos with differant settings and either got the cars to dark and the moon right or the cars right and the moon looked like a big star like in the cartoons I am shooting from a tripod.
Any ideas as to how to set this shot up so everything falls into place??
 

railohio

Active Member
You already hit on the biggest problem, the difference in light. Your best bet would be to expose for the moon and use a flash to fill in the cars. Lacking suitable flash equipment you could try to expose for the cars and use something to block the sky out of the moon for most of the shot. A few seconds before the end of the image remove the block and burn the moon in.
 

who_dat73

Member
Ok I am hearing what you are saying with the expose for the cars or the moon I have a fairly nice Phonix TTL flash and I asuming you meen set the lens on the cars and let the cam get the reading from that and then aim at the moon and use the setting from the cars to take the photo?

After thinking about it I might also try the block and expose method also and see how that works

Like I said I am still pretty new to all the F stop apature stuff if it was daylight I could take a prety good shot if I do say so myself sign1
 

Squidbait

Recovering ALCO-holic
There's a few ways to tackle this. First off, you'll need a tripod.

You can use your flash, and the camera should have a "slow sync" mode, or something like that. It will set a slow shutter speed to expose the background while the flash exposes the foreground.

Similarly, you could just experiment with long exposure times (seconds) and fire the flash by hand.

If your camera supports a "Bulb" mode, where you can lock the shutter open for a long time, you can "paint" the train with the flash, by walking around with the flash and illuminating different parts of it with multiple flashes. This is a cool technique that I've tried a couple of times, but haven't really mastered yet.
 

who_dat73

Member
Yea thats where the problem came in last time the cars came out looking ok but the moon was this big glowing glob up in the sky
 

Squidbait

Recovering ALCO-holic
How are you at photoshop? You could shoot the moon shot, and do your multiple exposures of the trains, and put them together in PS.

Or you could try HDR photography. Take several shots at a range of exposures and merge them together.
 

who_dat73

Member
Aww poop that was right in front of me and I never evin thought to do it wall1
Good point now I just got to wait for the moon to fill again
 
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