A few weeks ago was the full moon and I thought it would be a great time to take out the Leica Telyt Modular Long Lens system that is in our rental pool and snap some pictures. If you are like me and have tried to take pictures of the moon the results never quite capture the visual impact of the full moon hanging in the sky the way you want. Part of the reason is that even with a moderately long lens in the 200-300mm range, the moon takes up only a tiny fraction of the image. You do not get the presence of the moon, nor can you capture much of the fine details on the moons surface.
What you really need is a telescope with an eye-piece adapter for your camera, or a really long focal length lens. That’s why when the Leica Telyt lenses entered our pool I was excited to give them a try. The combination of two “head” units and 3 focusing modules provides a range of focal lengths from 280mm all the way up to 800mm. They lenses are quite heavy and need to be mounted directly onto the tripod so you will be attaching the camera onto the lens instead of the other way around.
I was very happy with the results I got with the 800mm setup. With the crop factor on the APS-C sensor in my camera the lens effectively functioned as a 1280mm lens for this shot. I used an adapter to fit the lens to my Canon T3i DSLR and waited up for the moon to rise above the trees around my house. Fortunately the moon is bright enough to be relatively easy to photograph requiring neither long exposures or high ISO’s. It should be noted that this photo is not cropped in any way, it is the full sensor readout of the camera.
– Keith M
