When I attempt to take a photo of the moon, it usually comes out as a featureless white blob, due to being overexposed. Thanks to a tip on Flickr, I discovered that the secret to taking a photo of the moon that doesn’t suck is to use spot metering rather than matrix.
With matrix metering, the camera will use both the dark sky and the bright moon to determine the exposure, which usually ends up overexposing the moon to avoid underexposing everything else. Spot metering lets you use only the moon to determine the exposure, which avoids the usual blown out appearance.
For this shot, I used my Sigma 70-300mm lens with shutter priority. Since I wasn’t using a tripod and this lens doesn’t have VR, I used a shutter speed of 1/250 with ISO 3200.
