Shooting in low light is something that’s extremely hard to do. With the exception of Nikon, many autofocus camera systems I’ve used don’t perform that well in this department. However, being a Blind Photographer has forced me to learn how to adapt and deliver only top quality images. Part of this comes form my training as a photojournalist. Here are tips on how to get the shots you want in hard to shoot situations like this without using a flash.

Focus Manually and Take Many Shots

I’ve written before about turning off autofocus, and I hold myself to that very seriously. One of my tactics is to focus on my subject, snap a photo, refocus jut a bit, snap a photo, refocus again, snap the photo and continue this process around two more times. After that I go through my shots and choose only the sharpest of the images. The reason why I do this is because my 5D Mk II’s low light focusing isn’t so great and nor is my 50mm F1.8 II’s. Additionally, I can’t always tell correctly when my subject is totally and perfectly in focus because of my vision.

My method of zooming in and focusing that Tim has referenced doesn’t work in the case of using a prime lens.

Shoot Wide

In the case of your zoom lenses, shooting wide can be in your advantage if the aperture changes throughout the zoom. This is where my method referenced above will work very well. It’s even better if you’re shooting with something like a 24-105mm F4 L or a 70-200mm F2.8 L. Not only will this allow for you to stay perfectly and completely still but it also means you can ditch the tripod. I’ve got some tips for shooting big cities at night while traveling light to supplement this.

Use Sharp Lenses with Wide Apertures

Wider apertures obviously allow you to shoot handheld at night because of their ability to let more light hit the sensor. In addition to this though, the sharper glass will allow you to get better and clearer images that your eyes may not be able to see through the viewfinder. That doesn’t mean you need to spend lots of cash though, as some prime lenses can be had for only around $100. It can be a much better alternative to your kit lens for the DSLR you just bought. The first shot in this posting was done with my 50mm.

Keep Your Eyes Focused and Your Mind Clear

This photo was featured by this blog before. The thing is that I knew exactly what I wanted and wasn’t going to stop until it was achieved by the camera. Sometimes it takes patience and a different combination of strategies but when you finally achieve the shot you want you’ll remember how you did it forever. Doing this requires you keeping a clear mind and focusing on exactly what you want. Focusing that hard puts my mind into a totally different mode and somehow or another, I see the world in a new light that allows me to achieve the shots that I want. So don’t let anything distract you from getting the shot.

For Portraits, Use Something for Fill Light

This is one of my protege’s, Alex. If this were shot without the light from her iPhone hitting her face, there would have been terrible shadows. So if you’re going to shoot photos in low light and don’t want to use flash, try to find something to provide fill light of some sort. Phones with their brightness turned up work well, so do street lamps positioned behind you as their light spills out onto the street.

What do you do to achieve your shots in low light?

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Out of Focue

I have had some trouble focusing recently. Not with concentrating (not more than usual anyway), but with my camera. Being visually impaired, I have to rely on my camera’s autofocus. Using manual focus requires that I can see the viewfinder. I use the viewfinder to compose (mostly), but definitely not to focus. Unfortunately, autofocus does not always save the day.

Over the last month or so, I have shot a baseball and two softball games. I had more than a few instances where I thought I was focusing on a player in the infield (the pitcher, batter or a runner), but the camera instead focused way off in the distance, usually the outfield fence. This ruined an unnecessary number of shots that would have otherwise been submitted to the paper. The photo editor commented to me about this, letting me know that he needed me to sort out this issue.

I had tried the different focus setting on my D40X, closest subject, dynamic and point. I had no luck whatsoever in getting consistent focus out of the camera. An unlikely rescue happened however. A young DC filmmaker came down for a visit to understand better the how photographic workflow is affected by visual impairment for an upcoming short film about (you guess it!) a blind photographer (follow news of The Blind Photographer movie on Twitter). I showed Isaiah, the producer, the raw results of the baseball assignment and explained the issue. He suggested a solution that seems to be quite widely known (except to me). Borrowing from an article, Turn Off Autofocus – Do it Yourself!s on Photography Bay, by fellow visually-impaired photographer Chris Gampat, “As I’ve learned when shooting actresses in short films while in college, it’s best to zoom in the tightest you can, focus on the exact point that you want the shot to be, zoom all the way out and then recompose your shot. This way all the detail that you could possibly want to make your shot work will be available to you.” I have tried this out with great results. I zoom in on the subject (or on something of equal distance) and half-press the shutter to engage the autofocus. Then, I either hit the autofocus lock or turn the lens to autofocus mode as I have not yet fully mastered the autofocus lock yet. Success (most of the time).

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More than two weeks ago I wrote about my excitement concerning the iPhone 3GS, because I figured it would be an accessible camera. By now I’ve got more than two weeks’ worth of practice behind me. So how did the iPhone work out for me as a camera? First of all, I think I need to make clear that we’re talking about a toy camera here. Although the iPhone’s camera now has autofocus, it’s 3MP, has a hideous lens, so it can in no way be compared with, say, a DSLR or – Gd forbid – my Leica M8. So just like with a toy camera, you use it to give you interesting results, you use it for a certain randomness, for the stuff you wouldn’t perhaps do with your proper, grown-up camera. And so, after checking out the basic features for a bit, I decided to go overboard entirely and buy a toy camera app, and a fake tilt/shift app and use those to process the camera’s images. But more about the apps later.

Shooting the camera is a very straightforward affair: you open the camera app, and then the camera is in viewfinder mode: you double tap the screen to focus, place one finger on the camera button just above the tactile “home” button and use another finger to split tap anywhere on the screen. This fires the shutter and the photo is stored in the photo app’s camera roll. That’s simple enough, but of course, I also wanted to process and upload, because I figured that with the iPhone’s accessibility features I would be able to control my entire workflow start to finish. Usually, I do the capturing myself, then the processing and uploading with the aid of a sighted assistant, because Lightroom, that I use for editing isn’t accessible for me. But with the iPhone that’s different. I installed Camera Bag, an app that imitates, among other settings, Holga and Lomo style processing. Apart from four unlabeled buttons, that are easy to learn, the entire application is accessible. The same goes for TiltShift, and app that does fake tilt shift processing. There’s a caveat here, because the central settings part, that let’s you drag the “sharpness” area to the spot and the size that you want, is inaccessible, and so can’t be changed if VoiceOver is running. However, I chose to use that as a shooting parameter, but then, I’m very much into selective focus, so that setting might be too much or cheesy to other users. I archive all my work online, at flickr, so the next task was to find a way of uploading. I tried a couple of dedicated flickr uploader apps, that either lacked accessibility or lacked features. Then I settled on Moby Picture, which is a media sharing environment for Twitter, but it also distributes your media (photo, sound and video) to other services, like flickr and facebook. I was pleased to discover that the application that comes with Moby is entirely accessible with exactly the features I was looking for. So that took care of uploading.

The fun is that I can process and upload the photographs I capture within a couple of minutes after pressing the shutter. Both TiltShift and CameraBag allow you to use the iPhone’s camera from within the application. That means that I use TiltShift to capture, save the file to the Cameraroll, open CameraBag to pick the photo from the Cameraroll, run it through CameraBag and save it, and then use MobyPicture to upload to flickr and twitter. I’ve found that it pays off to do this one photo at a time and use the entire workflow every time. It beats storing a couple of photos and processing them afterwards, because the processing apps leave the original photo intact and store a processed copy. If you have a lot of work to process, this may cause you to upload the originals instead of your processed work unless you keep good track of the filenumbers of your files inside the Photo application.

All in all I’ve had an enjoyable two weeks with the iPhone’s camera. To have control over the entire workflow again is a godsend and an unexpected gift. And the results, if I understand the comments on flickr correctly, are nothing to be ashamed of, even if we’re talking about a hyper expensive toy camera.

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