Shooting at the moon with a Point and Shoot camera is not an easy task and the limits of the camera become quickly obvious. Yesterday I have taken some shots as a test for tonight’s full-moon night.
This above is about as close as I got and I have tried out different settings.
How to take a picture of the Moon
Equipment used:
Tripod
Point and Shoot Camera
The canm used is a Leica V-Lux-20 with 12 MP on a 1/2.33 Sensor.
1. Automatic Settings
With automatic settings, the moon just came back as a white disc on a black background. The cam did not distinguish between the different shades and reliefs on the surface of the moon.
2. Zoom
The camera has optical and digital zoom systems as well as an extended optical zoom system.
The camera comes with a 12 x optical zoom and and extended optical zoom up to x 23.4. The extended optical zoom uses only a reduced part of the sensor to produce the picture. The photo can then be enlarged accordingly. The camera also uses an intelligent zoom system. This is a super resolution technology by which the zoom ratio can be increased by 1.3 times with about no deterioration of the picture quality.
Check out your camera menu, you may find iZoom or something similar there.
Make sure, when you shoot at the moon, that the macro zoom is switched off.
3. Manual Settings
In view of the limited zoom range and the small size of the sensor, I put the emphasis on settings where a maximum of quality (detail) is preserved, rather than on speed or zoom (size of the moon in the frame).
To achieve this and to prevent noise, I am a friend of low ISO numbers. Considering the use of a tripod, time is no problem, so if low ISO numbers trigger longer exposure, the tripod will prevent the shake effect.
The camera will consider the moon as a whole at infinite distance; blurs due to the spherical shape are not an issue with my material. However, too low F-stop numbers will increase exposure speed and from what my tests show, it’s preferable to compromise between aperture and speed.
I have started out with f/11 at 1/100 and I just got a white disc on black background.
The above shot shows a possible compromise:
- Aperture: f/4.9
- Exposure time: 1/250 s
- ISO speed: ISO-80
- Spot metering mode
- Focal length of 49 mm which is the equivalent of 399 mm in 35 mm format
- The program selector was on Aperture Priority.
The best advise is: start with some settings and then play with aperture and shutter speed moving them gradually and then select the best picture.
Blue Moon Vouliagmeni
The blue-moon has been achieved by tinting one of yesterday’s photos blue and by cleaning the whites.
Our new site “Destinations Expo” went live last night with some minimum content.
Destinations Expo Cape Town
Inspired by the Destinations Expo Cape Town which takes place these days we thought about creating a permanent Destinations Expo Online. The idea is simple: we open the site to Traveling and Tourism related business and publish selected Destinations throughout our publishing networks.
We are not yet sure about the final form and shape to give the online Destination Expo; however we believe that a Destinations Expo online, sorted by Countries or Places could be an interesting approach.
The combination of the main site and customer sites will provide advertisers and customers an unequaled marketing advantage. For the time being we are testing category structures and Google response.
Destinations Expo South Africa
To start with we will test Destinations in South Africa. Thereafter we will look closer at Greece and other countries.
Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics.
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The South African Media site comes first under this generic terms. Note that even under this term, 2 sites of the YORGOO Publishing Network show up on Top 10.
Destinations Expo 2010 Cape Town
This seems to be the correct full name of the event we are looking at.
Note the total absence of the Official site hosted by the South African Media Company, owners of the Expo. This site here takes ranks 1 and 2, while the YORGOO Blog and Garden Route Publishing sit on number 7 and 8. Interestingly all tourism authority sites are beaten.
Destinations Expo 2010
This short phrase returns an interesting result as well:
The official site makes it to the top while we get ranks 2 and 6. The tourism authority sites are all beaten again.
Conclusion
The Destinations Expo is not solidly branded online. I would expect to see the official site on top under all the above keywords. The local authority sites do a good job, however their SEO does not live up to the SEO standards of Semiomantics Frameworks used on all featured sites of our publishing network.
I am wondering now what a Semiomantics XO on a keyword related domain will do :-). Look forward to Destinations Expo our site under construction.
Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics.
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Subsequent to my previous post about the Destination Expo 2010 in Cape Town, I received some comments pointing to a video clip on YouTube about the event.
The Destination Expo 2010 Cape Town -- a School Case
I have used the example of the Destination Expo as a study case for Ycademy, our online business coaching center. The idea is to analyze the way the Expo Organizers use the internet to promote their event, considering namely, that tourism related low tech events are of interest to a global audience reachable through the internet.
My first observation was, that searching Google, I could barely find more than an invitation text release and the opening hours. I concluded that the organizers were not really interested in promoting the event using the Internet and I also concluded that the way the Expo is promoted is to no benefit of the Expo participants in as much as the Internet is concerned.
Destinations Expo Website
After some research I found a domain destinationsexpo.co.za. How surprised was I to find that the domain is redirected to a domain called cadek.co.za/des. There we find a website with informative content pertaining to the Destinations Expo 2010 in Cape Town. We learn on the site that:
“The Destinations Expo is owned and organised by:
CADEK Media
P.O. Box 5111
Helderberg
7135
South Africa”
There you go: the destinations expo website serves the purpose of promoting CADEK Media rather than the expo or its participants. The site does not have a very professional touch in spite the brochure gimmick. In any case the Internet as promotional medium is not exploited for the benefit of participants. From the tariffs we see that there is no online promotion available to participants …
Destinations Expo Cape Town Experiment
It’s easy to criticize sitting at the beach here in Greece. As said above, the purpose is to look at the Destinations Expo as a study case for the purpose of Ycademy. I therefore will also try to experiment with some ideas.
My research shows, that the Top Level Domains of “destinationsexpo” are all available! How surprising. Local domains (co.za may be fine, but when you have international or global ambitions, you want to grab the .com and maybe some other TLDs). In fact the local domains have lost their significance to a large extent during the past few years as developers notice that people have just a .com-reflex. Also, one always loses visitors to the .com … Brand protection starts with grabbing the main TLDs, which is a rather cheap affair as you get the domains for just a few bucks.
For the purpose of this experiment I have registered destinationsexpo.com with YorgoDom and then I set up a hosting account at Hosting South Africa at 1 Rand per Day. I will load a Semiomantics XO 3.x Publishing Framework and shoot at some related keywords, respectively I will show how participants could easily profit from an online promotion reaching far beyond the duration of the low tech Expo in Cape Town.
For the purpose of the exercise I will find my inspiration at the excellent Garden Route Directory as well as on other brilliant Projects, such as the Monkey Valley Resort Project by Bianca Gubalke from Noordhoek.
More about this experiment later. Let me install a site first :-).
Thinking about a website project:
Destination Expos take place all over the globe and one could even create a Destinations Expo Global Directory, inviting all such Expo organizers to join forces for marketing purposes and later may be for networking (just an idea :-)).
The Destination Expo Cape Town YouTube Clip has some great content and footage. Too bad the stitching of the pieces, namely of the first clip from Cape Town Tourism leads to distortions. (Would need to be post-edited again).
Shooting some sequences at this years event could lead to a more lively, less sterile video, whereas the production could be financed by the participants who are featured in the clip or who provide mini clips to be inserted. Lalakoi Publishing from the Garden Route is working with Customer Clips to provide high visibility to advertisers or site owners.
I could imagine that a Semiomantics Evolution site could be a great support for promotional clips linked to a dynamic content CMS.
Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics.
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This page is wiki editable click here to edit this page.
Today’s launch of the first travel and tourism exhibition, called “Destinations Expo 2010″ in Cape Town may well be the beginning of a future oriented development.
Local Expo – International Audience
The 2010 Expo is first of all a showcase of destinations,accommodation,traveling and holidays in South Africa and other nearby destinations.
Besides all the visitors attending the event, there are millions of people out there who are potentially interested in the topic and who are seeking to satisfy their desires via the Internet.
It is therefore surprising, that the Expo itself did not come up with a decent and well positioned website for and about the event.
Or are the organizers just the play-ball of some large tourism businesses privileging their best paying acolytes?
I don’t have the answer to this question; however, from what I can see, individual hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and lodges cannot individually count on the Expo 2010 to fetch new contacts through the Internet.
While the local crowd may enjoy the event, the remaining 6.5 billion potential customers are left out. This is not really a customer oriented policy, considering that nowadays most bookings are
made online.
Destinations 2010 Cape Town and the Internet
What do you need an Expo for if you cannot reach out for new customers or if the main markets cannot be reached?
If Destination 2010 is a low tech marketing idea, then it is the more important for businesses to brand themselves in a meaningful way online.
Smart examples can be seen at LalakoiPublishing.com and http://gardenroutedirectory.com.
Also some resorts are working on projects distributing highly visible media content, such as the Monkey Valley Resort near Cape Town.
Tourism and the Internet cannot be dissociated.
May be for next years Destinations Expo 2010 the organizers will invite some website developers who in the past have provided excellent services to South African Tourism, Lalakoi Publishing from the Garden Route or Bianca Gubalke Website Developments from Noordhoek, to name just two.
