July's (very almost) full moon

For your information, this isn't an under-exposed picture of the sun low down in the sky. No. Rather, this is a picture of the full moon - well, it's almost a full moon - over the roof of my neighbour's house. I took the picture this morning - it was just one of many - when I was awakened by bright moonlight streaming into the bedroom.

Time was about 5.30a.m. Despite feeling groggy, I had the presence of mind to go search for my camera. Turning to the window, I snapped a few shots without really thinking about the subject. They were bad, and that really woke me up.

So I began fiddling with the controls. It's good that this Fujifilm F500EXR came with manual control, better than my old Panasonic FS15, but there are still lots of limitations. Perhaps a DSLR is the next step to go. Anyway, there's also a 15X zoom on this camera which is of course very slightly better than my even older Minolta Konica Dimage Z5 camera which has a 12X zoom.

I took about 20 shots with the camera. All hand-held and despite the moon being so bright, there were still a few that turned out blurred because of camera shake. Image stabilisation does help but not totally. You would still need to learn how to steady yourself when using a long shutter speed or maxing out on the zoom control.

I just processed the pictures through Picasa and this, I should believe, is about one of the better pictures from the camera. BTW, it has been digitally enlarged to fit into the frame. Not what I would prefer to do normally.