"Shooting the Moon" Deconstruction - Photo IQ

A little while ago I posted a shot of the moon and promised a deconstruction post. As you wish.
Here is the original image:

 The HOW-TOs:
The lens I used was a Tamron 70-300. The moon is a long ways away and to get anything of value you need a nice, long lens. The one I used is a very inexpensive lens that I've owned for a long time but held on to because of the reach. I rarely use it as the quality is not great but in a case like this where I am stopping it down to the sweet spot it is usable.
That said, 300mm (equivalent to 486mm on a full-frame) still only got me this close:

I used a little bit of what the camera makers call "digital zoom" to bring it in "closer". The rest of us call it cropping. The final image you see on the web is actually full-sized pixel for pixel. It wouldn't make a great print but it is plenty big for the web. I shot it with my 10mp Canon 40D, if I had used my 18mp 7D I could have cropped it even closer and would have had more resolution in the moon itself. It's also worth noting that the night I made the image was the largest moon of the year. So it really doesn't get much closer than this.
With that much zoom a tripod is important.  
The  biggest problem people have when trying to photograph the moon is using the auto-exposure metering. The camera meter will average the amount of given light and always over-expose. You need to go manual on this one unless you have enough lens to get much, much closer so the moon is a more significant percentage of the frame. Even spot metering generally gets me too much light. The moon puts off far more light than you'd expect.

The image was shot at ISO 200 and exposed for 1/200 of a second at f 8.0. You can see that there is plenty of light to make a good exposure. I started at f 8 and 1/60 and just dropped the exposure til the moon had the amount of detail I wanted and I could see a nice range. (I really wanted f 8.0 because that's the point where this lens is the sharpest. With a higher quality lens I could have shot much more open and perhaps even got enough shutter speed to hand-hold it.)
The other important feature to consider is the mirror lock-up.
Using such a long zoom means that every small movement of the camera is amplified. I had a good shutter speed so I probably would have been okay but if I were shooting something dimmer, camera shake could really be a problem. That's where the mirror lock-up feature comes into play.
In a DSLR camera, you are looking directly through the lens via a mirror that covers the sensor then flips up as you press the shutter release. If you are shooting at slower shutter speeds. even on a tripod, the tiny amount of shake from the mirror flipping up can blur the image.
Mirror Lock-up is exactly what it sounds like. It locks the mirror up so that when you trip the shutter, there is no movement at all inside the camera aside from the shutter itself.
Canon puts the feature in the menus as a custom function but more and more it's becoming easier to do by simply switching your camera to live view. In order to have a live view setting (where you can see through the lens on the lcd screen on the back of the camera) the mirror must be moved out of the way. If your camera has that feature-as do more and more dslrs-it accomplishes the same thing.
That's all for today, leave me a comment if I forgot something or you have suggestions for future posts!

As autumn comes in and it gets more and more pleasant outside, take some time to go out and shoot the moon!