(01-15-2021, 04:54 AM)Senor Fantastico Wrote:

(01-14-2021, 10:49 PM)homebiscuit Wrote: A good method for taking pictures of the real moon, or anything which tends to overexpose, with an iPhone is to use AE/AF Lock function and then darken exposure adjustment. 

I'm not sure if the new iPhones operate the same as my iPhone 7, but probably do. Hold your thumb or finger on the screen over the object you're shooting and hold it there for a couple of seconds.  The picture will probably darken and an outline frame will pop up. "AE/AF LOCK" will appear at the top of the screen. The Automatic Exposure and Automatic Focus are now locked. Next to the outline frame you will see a little sun icon that can be slid up and down to change exposure. Not only does it come in handy for shooting bright objects in high dynamic settings (large contrast between the object and its surroundings) but it's also good for brightening up dark exposures. 

I'm sure the newer phones have better cameras than the one I have, but they've certainly left some controls available to the user. If the phone keeps losing focus or needs more or less exposure, give that a try. It's also really handy for doing macro shots when the area of focus is very shallow.

I saw a moon photo that the person took x amount of photos and made a composite out of it. Not real sure what that does but it looked super cool.

It’s called stacking, which averages out noise by the sheer number of exposures. Astrophotographers use it for long time-frame shooting as an object is tracked across the sky. They put it through a stacking program which edits out noisy and distorted shots and combines the good ones to show the most detail.

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