I got a great picture of May’s Flower Moon. It’s reddish, lit by the sun at night.
I took pics on Friday night, but they were not so clear, I was never able to get a clear picture of the moon in the past. But a friend posted a beautiful image she took the same night.
I said to her, “You always take such great moon pictures.” She said she took it with her iphone and she’ll show me how to do it.
Having no patience to wait for her to show me, I googled it and I found out how to take a picture of the moon with an iphone or any night shot for that matter. And on Saturday night, I got the image I was always trying to get. A beautiful moon image.
If you don’t have patience, like me, and don’t care about how to do it, just skip the rest of this below and just enjoy the pics here!
You need to use the 1x Wide lens or the 2x Telephoto lens if using the latest iphone. For some reason, the 0.5x lens doesn’t work for night images. There is a night vision icon (a moon) at the upper left when looking at the phone/camera. The icon usually pops on by itself, but if not, it will be white. Just tap it to put the night mode on.
I had seen that working the night before, it does a count down, holding the shutter open, but I didn’t know what it meant and I kept stopping it from doing it’s thing.
But that’s what you want — it will count down the seconds it needs to capture the night image — usually 3 to 5 seconds. Maybe more in a very dark space.
After that, you need to play with the editing feature on the phone. Edit the image to get rid of all the light and bring up the brightness of the image itself. Make the sky around it black.
Save it. And after saving it, you may see a halo around the moon. Open the image again, and darken it.
So you’re going to edit it twice — first time using everything you can to bring out the brightness and clarity. Second time, getting rid of the by darkening the background.
Hopefully that works for you.
Originally published at tomversation.com on May 7, 2023.
