To begin with, qualifications:

My first camera, a Ansco Cadet, was made so long ago that you can only get the film from Croatia. I won’t say what year that was, but my age and the ASA (now ISO) of Kodachrome were both the same –10.

During six years running a photo lab in Seattle, Wash., I saw every kind of problem and made every mistake you can make processing film. Our specialty was optically enlarging 35mm and smaller negatives into 2x3-foot posters with modified off-the-shelf darkroom and graphics arts equipment.

One of my retail customers was the late (and eccentric) cryptozoologist Jon Beckjord. During that time, only one man brought me UFO photos to analyze – but more about that later.

I didn’t come here to boast, however, but to bemoan the sorry state of UFO photography. Although I am seeing more UFO photos and videos than ever, thanks to cell phones and the Internet, neither their quality nor their information content is what it used to be.

Daily, it seems, we are treated to new views of a glowing blob or blobs (blobettes? Blobules?) that dance(s) against a black velvet background while the autofocus camera, unprogrammed for such an obscure subject, helplessly focuses in and out, in and out.

Partly this decline is due to the very technology that has made cameras small enough to fit in a shirt pocket or a cellular phone, the digital imaging chip. Although they are convenient, the low resolution of many of these chips makes reliable image interpretation a challenge, if not an arcane (and occasionally arbitrary) “black art.”

Is this a UFO or is it lens flare?

However, equally often, as the devious HAL 9000 supercomputer complained, “This sort of thing has cropped up before… and it has always been due to human error.”

Let me therefore enumerate seven simple, but not always cheap, ways you, the photographer, can improve your odds of getting that one-in-a-million shot where, as Arthur C. Clarke sarcastically remarked, “…(Y)ou can read the Martian license plates.”

1) GET A TRIPOD! Yes, I know they’re a drag to lug around, but at least keep one in the trunk of your car! I’ve seen so many swaying, wobbling videos of something – something – tantalizing out there that I’m on a permanent Dramamine drip. Is the object moving, or is it the camera operator? Or both?

Even the near-ubiquitous employment of image stabilization systems can’t keep up with the enormous magnification of modern ultra-zoom lenses, but keep yours switched on anyway!

Lacking a tripod, learn to think like a sniper. Try to rest the camera on something solid – a wall, a windowsill, a balcony railing. Or brace yourself against a doorway, elbows on the trunk of a car, leaning up against a tree. This can be very effective, even with a long, heavy telephoto lens!

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