Jim Zuckerman

Low light photography requires technical discipline to get the kind of pictures you want. Obviously artistry is also part of the equation, but shooting when the light is reduced presents technical problems that can only be dealt with using technical solutions.

One of the first techniques I learned in photography was to use long exposures at night to blur traffic lights. I liked it decades ago, and I still enjoy seeing artful streaks of light superimposed over an urban environment. You never know exactly what the resulting images will look like, and that’s part of the fun. When the background happens to striking, like the Walt Disney Theater in Los Angeles, California (#1), the combination of abstract lights and architecture makes a winning photograph.

I have always found tree bark intriguing. It comes in myriad colors, patterns, designs and textures, and it reminds me of photographing abstract art. I am always looking at tree trunks and branches when I travel, and at home when I visit a botanical garden I know there will be a lot of photographic material. The abstract images you can photograph run the gamut from brilliant and saturated “works of art” to those that are much more subtle. The two images (#1 and #2) illustrate the tremendous range of subject matter available to you.

I’m sure you have been intrigued by the rainbow colors you can see in CDs and DVDs. As a visual person, it’s hard not to be attracted to these intense, supersaturated colors. I’ve tried to photograph them but was never happy with the results until I experimented with placing drops of water on the surface of the disc. That changed everything. The colors of the CD combined with the defined shapes of the drops in amazing ways, and this was even more captivating than just seeing color in the disc.