Taking shots of the moon is always a challenge because of the extreme contrast of shooting a bright object on a black background. However, shooting a crescent moon versus shooting a full or half-full moon is a whole different ball game. !!WARNING!! Photo-geek content ahead!! Trying to get a proper spot metering on a crescent moon requires a longer telephoto lens than I have, so many of the shots the bright part of the moon is way over-exposed and the partially visible dark part of the moon vanishes completely! So I tried using an exposure bracket +-2 EV, and still got over exposure. So I tried another bracket adjusting the regular exposure to compensate by using a faster shutter; still too much exposure. I tried an HDR image (basically blends the exposures of several images to get one well balances image) using the collection of images from these attempts, and I hit a serious limitation with my equipment. The result was too much noise, and you could almost see the rows of pixels of the camera sensor. Using the HDR technique can bring out in a scene things you wouldn’t see in a single shot. So what you see here are the best single images (no HDRs) of the evening.
