Tips for photography in nocturnal houses & night time (Canon edition)

[Rizz Carlton]

I apologized if this thread may have been made before, but I thought my case would be more specific.

I have a Canon EOS 600D, with EFS 18-55mm macro and Zoom lens EF 75-300mm lenses (Both are Canon lenses). I tried taking photographs during night time and in nocturnal houses, didn't ended up succesfuly. I try to avoid camera flash as much as possible as to not harm the animals, I do have a camera flashlight but I thought it's still have the same issues as with flash (?). In additional cases, nocturnal houses have red or dark-blue lighting, I have no clue on how to circumvent that without my camera also making the picture very dark and very hard to look at.

There are so many interesting animals that are exclusively kept at dimly-lighted and nocturnal settings, I don't think I can afford to lose chances in taking a proper shot, let alone a good one!

Any tips or experiences that you guys like to share? Thank you in advance!

 

[Lafone]

Hopefully someone might have some better thoughts as I don't use Canon and indeed don't usually bother to break out my main camera in a nocturnal house.

However you can get some pretty good results, proactively turning flash off, with a phone camera (held very steady as the phone will have a long exposure for the light). I do know some people have had access while the 'day' is active or the house is lit for cleaning or feeding etc but that requires the zoo to allow it.

I would have thought you need a very low F stop for your lens to bring any light in at all in a nocturnal house. Someone might have got good results above say 2.8 but I'd say that would be as high as you'd want to go. You could probably get something good using a tripod at a really low shutter speed with a fast lens.

Obviously any set up with flashlights or guns or box lighting would be unsuited for a zoo unless it was with permission.

 

[Rizz Carlton]

I apologized if this thread may have been made before, but I thought my case would be more specific.

I have a Canon EOS 600D, with EFS 18-55mm macro and Zoom lens EF 75-300mm lenses (Both are Canon lenses). I tried taking photographs during night time and in nocturnal houses, didn't ended up succesfuly. I try to avoid camera flash as much as possible as to not harm the animals, I do have a camera flashlight but I thought it's still have the same issues as with flash (?). In additional cases, nocturnal houses have red or dark-blue lighting, I have no clue on how to circumvent that without my camera also making the picture very dark and very hard to look at.

There are so many interesting animals that are exclusively kept at dimly-lighted and nocturnal settings, I don't think I can afford to lose chances in taking a proper shot, let alone a good one!

Any tips or experiences that you guys like to share? Thank you in advance!

I attempted to photograph some galagos in a local zoo, which are held in their nocturnal house which are using red-light for some of their animals. It appears that red or blue lighting might still support photography without using camera flash. The only thing I need to do is to adjust my shutter speed to around 80-100 and ISO to anything between 800-64000, as well as manually adjust my lense.

These are the best results (Bit blurry since I had to download them again for my phone sadly).

 

[CMP]

Crank the ISO up, the shutterspeed down, and hope the subject stays still long enough to get a semi-workable photo.

 

[RatioTile]

I use a Canon point-and-shoot, the Canon PowerShot G9X, for dark exhibits and fish tanks, basically anything indoors with short distance and a glass or acrylic barrier. Gets me results like this:

Western Fat-Tailed Dwarf Lemur (Cheirogaleus medius) - ZooChat