The Moonlight Camera

The Netflix wildlife documentary series Night on Earth is entirely shot by night and many scenes don't have any additional light sources. A lot of it is just lit by the moonlight.

The term "moonlight camera" is used a few times by the voiceover to refer to these cameras which are basically full spectrum video cameras used on high iso settings.

I decided to built my own moonlight camera. Here are the different elements I need :

• A high iso capable camera. I have a Sony a6300 which goes up to 25600 iso. It's not an A7S but it has a very strong and efficient noise reduction algorithm. It also has full sensor readout so every photon that hit the sensor is turned into signal (no pixel binning or line skipping) so no light is lost.

• A full spectrum convertion. In environments with a lot of plants that are very bright in IR, you can gain more than 2 stops of exposure with a full spectrum conversion

• A super fast lens. I bought a cheap Meike 50mm f0.95 lens on amazon. It's a huge piece of glass. There in a nuance though : the lens has with no doubt a f1 maximum aperture as the entrance pupil is 5cm in diameter and a focal lengths of 50mm. But the lens is probably not a T1 lens : the bulky glass elements must absorb a significant amount of the light that passes through it, so it's not as bright as you would think. It's still the brightest of all my lenses. It mesures at T1.2.

I checked my setup with an exposure calculator and it looks like I should be good :

This calculation is not accounting for all the additional light the IR will bring to the Image. On paper I should even be able to get my shutter at a 180° angle for better motion blur thanks to the infrared.

In practice however i wasn't able to get to 1/50s shutter speed. For some reason I could even have used some more light...