Need some help with night wild life photos

[Marcy]

recently I have been shooting some wildlife around the verde valley in Az at night -my question is how do you get a good focus on the animals when it is so dark - I am out in the middle of no where minimal lights available
I can not seem to get autofocus to work due lack of light and my manual focus is a little better but not spot on - any suggestions ????
I have had a great variety of subjects, skunks, javolina, coyote, raccoons, all sorts of visitors but not real good captures due to lack of crisp focus
my flash works fine but I can not see the critter well enough to get good focus
any help will be appreciated -

[Marcy]

nobody has any ideas or tricks???

[Mnbruce]

I can not see the critter well enough to get good focus
any help will be appreciated -

I think that says it all. If you can't see your subject I doubt any lens can focus on it. I don't think there are many tricks to help.

[scrumpy]

Years ago when I was able to crawl around the woods at night, I got very good sightings of deer and badgers, stoats and weasels, with the aid of a flashlight with the lens covered in that red see-through paper that chocolates come wrapped in. Animals can't see red.

There are some small and very efficient Mag lights you can get which have long narrow beams - some as long as forty feet. One of these with a red lens would I am sure do the trick.
Another is a LED headlight. I see one available here in UK with two white lights and one red light you can use on its own.

http://www.needbatteries.co.uk/energizer-3-led-headlight-227-p.asp

Just a couple of ideas - hope its been of some help.

I know nothing about flash photography, but don't some flash units send a beam in poor light to focus with?

[Tom Reichner]

This coyote image was made at night. Pitch black night - no moonlight at all. No flash, either. Hmmm - where's the light from, then? headlights!

I had not planned on doing any night shooting, but when this coyote allowed us to pull the car right up to her without running off, I realized I would be able to position the car so that the headlights were on her. Then I got out, knelt down low to get at eye level, cranked the ISO way up, and shot away! Focus wasn't a problem, as there was sufficient light from the headlights.

Of course, I just got lucky, and don't think I could repeat this, but it was fun just the same, and surprising that an image taken with only headlight illumination could turn out pretty good.

-Tom

[ebj]

Best bet is to get a night camera and mount it on a tripod. It has a motion sensor ,infrared focus and a strong flash. Set it up, go to bed and in the morning see what you got.

[Matthew Patrick]

If you have a Canon EX flash you can set it not to fire in custom functions and just use it for the better AF.

[Tom Reichner]

Best bet is to get a night camera and mount it on a tripod. It has a motion sensor ,infrared focus and a strong flash. Set it up, go to bed and in the morning see what you got.

How do you adjust the camera angle for the most effective composition? Is the creature facing from left to right, or from right to left? Or is it head on? These things affect the way you want the camera aimed, and cannot be predicted precisely beforehand.

Also, how do you make sure that the focus is on the animal's eyeball? It'd suck to get a half decent image of an animal, only to find that the shoulder, leg, neck, etc was in clear, sharp focus, but that the eye was soft.

Getting excellent photos of wildlife is extremely difficult when the camera is right there in your hands and you're looking thru the viewfinder. How would you ever get such high quality images from a remote setup in which you've relinquished so much control?

[ebj]

As Marcy was talking about night shooting, I think it is impossible to get a sharp focus on an eyeball of an animal in the dark.