Photographing A Full Moon

Photographing the moon is something I have never done before, so on a very clear crisp evening I ventured out with my camera, 100-400mm lens and 2x extender mounted on a tripod. It's surprising just how bright the moon really is as I soon found out when I shot the first image at 1/160 second on f11 at ISO 400. Previous attempts to capture the subtle gradations on the moons surface failed with overexposure including 1/50 second and 1/80 second. However, this is not to say that using slightly longer exposures cannot give pleasing results. The second image you see here (shot on a separate evening) with the moon more bleached out, out of focus behind the spiked branches blurred from the breeze, combined with an exposure of 1/2 second, offers enough light to highlight the foreground detail, whilst giving the impression of movement but the downside is that the moons detail is lost which is why I chose an aperture of f8 to keep the depth of field relatively shallow.