After photographing wildlife at night with Canon film cameras for a couple of years I decided to switch to a Canon 10D digital SLR . While the advantages of digital make sense for everyday photography, they make even more sense for remote night photography where the success rate is fairly low due to the limited control you have over your subject. Setting up the flash positions, checking exposure and testing the trigger device are made easy, and you can catch simple mistakes right away using the instant review capability of digital.

There are several challenges to overcome when using a digital camera for night photography, however. The first challenge clearly is camera power management. A fully charged BP-511 battery will only last a few hours, so initially I would turn the camera on around 6:00pm and go out to change the battery around 9:00pm, then just let it go dead in the middle of the night. There are a couple of relatively inexpensive solutions to this problem using the Canon DR-400 DC Coupler. Using this adaptor along with the AC adaptor, you could run an extension cord out to the camera if the set up is close to an outlet. I didn't like the extension cord idea, so the approach I chose was to use just the DC Coupler with four 4V 8 amp-hr battery cells to configure an 8V 16 amp-hr battery. Two cells in series make 8V 8 amp-hr. Those two pairs put in parallel make 8V 16 amp-hr. The camera runs on 8V and 16 amp-hr is plenty of capacity to power the camera all night.

The next challenge I ran into was "the moment". I noticed when I tried to trigger the camera by breaking the infrared beam that there was a bit of a delay. I use a Radio Shack Pulsed Infrared Invisible Beam Intrusion Sensor Cat. No. 49-551A wired to two leads of the electronic cable release. Initially I thought this was just camera shutter lag, but it was too long for that. After searching through the Canon 10D owner's manual, I found a reference on page 30 to "a moment" of delay that occurs if the shutter release button is not pushed half way (also called detent position). Once the button is pushed half way, the camera is "awake" and the only delay is shutter lag. I thought this was a relatively simple problem to solve, and all I had to do was find some method to hold the shutter button down halfway keeping the camera in detent mode all night. I arranged a rubber band around the camera body and small twig to hold just the right amount of pressure against the shutter release button and sure enough, the camera stayed awake. Unfortunately, two bad things happen when you do this. One is that the camera goes through batteries about twice as fast. The other more serious problem is that when the button is being held down, data cannot transfer from the buffer to the CF card. The result is that you get 9 shots or so and then the camera locks up waiting for the data to be transferred to the card. Not a good situation for wildlife photography where you might have several visitors to your set up in one night.

The solution to the high power consumption was to use the big battery. The solution to the data transfer problem was more difficult. What I really needed was to push the button for a few seconds, then release it for a few seconds to allow data transfer, then push it again before the camera fell back to "sleep". What I ended up doing to solve this issue was to use a 555 timer circuit hooked up to the two wires of the electronic release cable that connect to the detent. This circuit turns on and off every 3 sec or so keeping camera "awake" which allows data to transfer in 3 sec intervals. The circuit runs on the same 8V battery used to power the camera.

Once all the technical problems associated with using a digital camera were solved, I was able to photograph bobcats, barred owls, a screech owl, coyotes, opossum, raccoons, and one golden lab over a 1 year period. My typical setup uses the Radio Shack Infrared beam trigger device with the transmitter and reflector just out of the frame on the left and right. Two flashes are usually placed about 3 ft from the bait at 45 degree angles at 1/16 power for fast recycling. I also sometimes use an additional flash from above to highlight the subject's head, back, and wings. One flash is connected to the camera with a PC cord and the other two are slaved using optical slave units.

Of course the preferred bait is squirrel road kill although I've been experimenting with using mice from www.rodentpro.com. If you have a digital camera and some willing subjects at night (you probably have more than you know), give Photographing Wildlife at Night a try!

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