Shoot for the Moon

We had an amazing full moon last night, and well since our new camera is still so new and shiny and I can't put it down, I had to try my hand at taking pictures of it.  How could you not want to take a picture of something so beautiful!  Well, I quickly learned that despite my nice new shiny camera, I still couldn't take a good picture of the moon....at least not without a few adjustments first!

I'm brand new to this whole photography thing, having only owned a DSLR camera for a week, and slightly overwhelmed is an understatement for all that I have to learn about it!  However, every new setting I play with and tricks I do learn get me really excited so I have to share them.

First off, here's a picture I took of the moon in all auto settings at 300mm on my zoom lens.  I was less than impressed.  It's a nice white circle, but it's not the moon I was looking for!  And it's most definitely not the moon I saw while looking through the viewfinder to take that shot.  I knew the camera could do better than this.

So I came back inside and hit Google.  A quick "how to photograph the moon" search led me to this site,  http://photographylife.com/how-to-photograph-moon, from Photography Life.  Can you tell how much of an amateur I am?  I read through the entire post, and then I popped open my camera's User Manual and started hunting down the settings it suggested.

After a few quick changes, I went back outside and snapped this photo.

Well now, that's much better!  It's as close as I can get with my current lens, but I think it's pretty impressive considering the moon is over 200,000 miles away.  It's clear I need to spend more time in manual learning the settings so hopefully I can do things like this in the future without Googling it first.  Now, if only I didn't have to wait until April for my Nikon for Dummies book to be released!