P#6 Q#7a: What Exercises Can You Do to Improve Your Twilight and Night Photography?

A compelling subject -- and what else -- make for good night photography?

Jim Zuckerman: An exercise: definitely put yourself in the situation where you have a compelling subject and use a tripod. I'll tell you that one of the things that you have to make sure is that your pictures are sharply focused.

The exercise I would suggest is to shoot on manual focus and practice focusing the camera manually, because autofocus can easily fail in lowlight situations.

Autofocus is so convenient to rely on, but there are times when it can be fooled. One of those times is when you don't have enough contrast.

If you're shooting in real lowlight situation, the autofocus may have trouble locking onto the difference between a highlight and a shadow.

Since the autofocus usually happens in the middle of the frame, if you're composing the picture such that you have a lot of night sky and that takes up some of the middle of the frame, you really want to be sure that you take the lens off of autofocus and focus manually.

Just go back and forth with the lens until it looks like you're at the critical point. I cannot tell you how many times I've been shooting lowlight and just assumed the lens was focused correctly, and it wasn't. It's very disappointing if the picture is not sharp.

Lots of people have not focused manually for years because they just let the camera do it. All of the automatic features that we have on our cameras, to be honest, they're seductive. They seduce us into relying on them.

Then when auto exposure fails or autofocus fails, we go, "What happened?" You can't leave your brain home.

You have to constantly be monitoring the camera to make sure it's doing what you want it to do. That certainly includes focus.

Audri Lanford: Excellent.

Well, we've talked about a lot of different things today (to put it mildly). What's the one thing that you most want people to remember from today's interview that will make the biggest difference in their twilight and night photography? I don't know how you're going to pick one but I'm asking you anyway.

Jim Zuckerman: Don't rely on the automatic features of the camera. You have to be the boss; you have to be the director. You have to always monitor what that camera is doing. That's really important - not just for twilight, to be honest, with everything. That's number one.

Number two is use a low ISO. Number three, use a tripod. And number four is have fun.

In conclusion

To have success with night photography, don't rely on the automatic features of your camera, use a low ISO and a tripod, and most important -- have fun.