Telescope Reviews: Hi everyone, exposure question for you

Don25, that's it. But you do not need to start with slide film.

Your first question should be, how are you going to use this film. Are you going to use it is a slide show, print it at home. or scan it. If it is for a slide show, then slides are the way to go. Print film would be better for the other two (you can print and scan from slides as well but print film can hold more information, making slides from negatives is also possible,but you need a good professional photofinisher or have a way to use and color balance a stange breed of films called print film (nothing to do with your film)).

One of the problems of negative (print) film is how to determine if it was exposed correctly. This cannot be determined from the print unless you are doing the printing. You must judge the exposure from the negative. This can make it difficult to know if that exposure would be suitable for slide film. A half stop difference on negative film is not so large, but can be significant for slides. Also, by overexposing print film you can get extra information that can be drawn out of the negative when printing. When you shot negative film, printing (or scanning) is an intragral part of the process. You basically have to nail the slide exposure (and the slide has a very narrow brightness range it can record which makes lunar photography even more fun). One type of film can be a guide for the exposures for another, it will get you in the ballpark but it will not be perfect.

One advantage with many celestial targets is that there many "correct" exposures. A portrait is very limited, I can make the skin so dark or light before it starts to look wrong. We don't have an intuitive sense of how dark or light space objects are. Even with the moon, you can give a little more exposure to make it shine, or reduce the exposure to create rich dark textures.

Practice is the best teacher here. And when you shoot, try to take note on the conditions; sky conditions, transparency and seeing, how dark the sky is if you are shooting near dawn or dusk, as well as the position of the object above the horizon. These all affect exposure as well as contrast and resolution. Also experiment. If someone says something is not possible, they just mean they could not get a good result. You learn more from mistakes. And film is cheap!

PS If you do use flash, you must open the shutter four seconds after the flash goes off when photographing the moon. Not used with DSOs because of the length of time the light takes to travel to and return from the subject.