Showerthought: I spent years taking blurry moon photos before realizing my mistake

I used to always take pictures of the moon with my phone camera and they came out looking like a glowing light blob. Last month I borrowed my buddy's DSLR and a cheap tripod and tried again. Still got the same fuzzy result. Then I noticed my autofocus was hunting around the entire sky. Some random guy on a hiking trail near Tahoe told me to switch to manual focus and dial it to infinity. I had no idea that was even a thing after like 6 years of trying. Point is, the camera kept trying to focus on nothing in the dark sky, not the moon itself. Has anyone else had that "aha" moment with a simple setting change that made all the difference?

3 comments

3 Comments

alexw7525d ago

See this is where I kind of disagree with @oliver2 and the rest. The infinity setting is a bandaid, not a fix. The real issue is that phone cameras just aren't built for moon shots, period. You can dial in manual focus all day but the sensor is tiny and the lens aperture is fixed. You're still gonna get a glowing blob. I've tried it on three different phones with the infinity trick and it's still trash compared to even a cheap point and shoot from ten years ago. The aha moment for me was realizing my phone camera has physical limits no setting can fix.

oliver226d ago

Three years of blurry moon shots and a full lunar eclipse before my neighbor's kid showed me the infinity focus trick in two seconds flat. Makes me wonder how many other simple fixes are hiding in plain sight.

alicesingh20d ago

idk @alexw75 might have a point about phone cameras having limits, but for me the infinity focus thing was a total game changer. I was out camping with my little Canon Powershot and got so frustrated with the moon looking like a fuzzy light bulb. Then this older guy at the campfire just casually said "lock the focus to infinity" and walked away. After that I could actually see craters and stuff, not perfect but way better than before. So yeah I think there's some middle ground where a cheap camera and a simple setting can get you closer than you think, even if it's not gonna win any photo contests.