Questions & Actions: Flash for Bird Photography

I was wondering if you could talk a bit about using flash for bird photography. I see so many stunning photos of birds in trees and other darkened areas, and it certainly appears as if artificial lighting of some sort is used, but wasn't sure what the tips and tricks to this would be. Really don't want to frighten the birds with a blinding flash. Thanks, Melanie Gorman

Photography such as this are of a style known as Chiaroscuro in the art world. Images such as these of wild animals are not created using flash. Instead, it’s a matter of finding scenarios where the dynamic range of the scene is greater than the camera’s ability to record stops of light between pure black and pure white.

Flash is favorite topic of mine because it is so often misunderstood in nature photography. In other genera of wildlife photography, the use of flash is as basic and common place as high ISO in the wildlife photography world. But for those photographers trekking gear around in hopes of recording that magic moment in the wild, only about 1% of photographers have a solid grasp of flash and how it is put to use in nature.

Entire books are written about this subject, of course. And in my honest opinion, the majority I have read are overly complicated. Do we really need to understand the inverse square law today? Sure, it still applies. But no wildlife or nature photograph I know walks about the woods thinking of how the intensity of flash they need will be inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them and their subject. I think I had a heart palpitation just writing that out.

Instead, to make it functional in the field, we need to simplify things down considerably. And while this is still a gigantic topic, I’m going to try and tackle this in simple language.

To answer Melanie’s question above, we first must define the two ways flash is used in nature photography: key light and fill flash.

Key light might be a term you’re not familiar with. Don’t worry about this so much. It’s simply flash that is used as your primary source of light.

Fill flash is different. Ambient light is the primary source of light used for the photograph and flash is used very subtly to help add light to shadowed area or add a little “pop” to the subject in terms of light and color (color is light).

When it comes to creating images with the dark backgrounds, where the subject is beautifully illuminated and the background is either black or moody and mysterious, we would use flash as our primary source of light. In other words, we use a key light. In doing so, we can reduce the exposure down for the background in camera and only illuminate the subject with the flash (there are always 2 different exposures you set when using flash: in camera and in flash).

The problem with this method, however, is that this would be extremely difficult to do with birds.

The reason for this is that to use flash as your primary source of light, you must set the flash off camera. With closer subjects, we can hold a flash off to the side. But with telephoto work for wildlife such as birds, there are very few situations where this is possible.  

When using a single flash, we place it off camera to make the light look realistic. It creates highlights and shadows and depth and detail. If you have a powerful flash coming from the direction of your camera, you just create that overly flashed and awful look that we all came to expect from using a disposable camera back in the day.

The number one rule of flash in nature photography is this: NEVER use flash as a key light when it is coming from the same direction as your lens and camera.

This means that in order to properly use flash as the primary source of light with a bird, you would need the flash to be positioned on a light stand off to the side of the perch with a softbox attached (think model or fashion photography).

With macro photography you can use various gadgets to position your flash off axis from your camera while still being attached to the camera. Often times I simply hold the flash in my left hand while shooting with my right. But macro photography is all about working with subjects usually inches (or less) from the lens.  

Birds are different because birds are much farther away. The only way you would be able to pull this off is if you are working with a feeder setup where you can guarantee a bird is going to come to a particular spot. Think: multi-flash hummingbird setups or feeders like the ones you find at bird photography lodges across Central and South America.  

So, outside of feeder setups for small songbirds and hummingbirds, in bird photography we use fill flash – if we use flash at all.

When you see bird photographers wandering around with brackets holding a flash above their lens, they are using fill flash. Or, at least they should be using it as fill flash.

As noted above, with fill flash we are only adding a “kiss” of light to the subject to help make it pop. This gives the photo a little boost.

The natural light is still the natural light. Our in camera exposure is set to create exactly the type of photograph we want to make. Then we set our flash exposure to provide the smallest amount of light possible while still being picked up by the camera. When you use TTL flash, for instance, this would be a Flash Exposure Compensation around -1.3 to -2.

Actions

As for flash photography with birds, don’t expect a flash to save you from bad light. When you have a background in full sun and a subject in deep shade, don’t even turn on the camera. The amount of flash you will need to balance the ambient light and the subject will be so great that the photo will look awful. The only way to overcome this would be with off camera flash which is usually not possible with birds away from feeder setups. You are better off simply trying to find a different background or a different subject.

Remember, it’s just as important to know when not to make a photograph as to how to make one.

Use fill flash with your bird photography to help give the subject a little “pop.” Birds are colorful. More light intensifies those colors. And that little bit of light can help pull the subject out of the environment similar to using larger apertures.

With this said, in many situations that were once important examples of when and why to use fill flash, modern technology has begun to make the use of flash in some of those situations and less and less of a requirement. When many of the people teaching photography today were first learning this stuff ourselves, we were using film cameras with 3 – 5 stops of dynamic range in our negatives or slides. Likewise, the power of software such as Lightroom and Photoshop with the ability to use adjustment brushes to easily work on one part of a photograph separate from another has also been an extraordinary leap forward. Today, we also wield cameras that can create beautiful images upwards of 20,000 ISO while early iterations of digital fell apart above 800 or 1,600 ISO.

Fill flash is still important in certain types of bird photography. It’s just that it is no longer as necessary as it once was.

But when it comes to creating those beautiful dark backgrounds such as the photograph that accompany this article, this is all about finding and working with natural light in the wild. The only way you can create these images otherwise is in controlled situations with off-camera flashes which is only something you typically see at feeder setups.

I wrote a very detailed how-to article about using off camera flash which can be found in the PhotoWILD Magazine membership dashboard and plan to do another article in an upcoming issue all about using fill flash for birds and wildlife – read: as soon as I get back from Panama. In this article, I will be discussing everything one needs to know these days about using fill flash for bird photography. Remember, you get access to all the back issues, member only article series, and ebooks when you are a subscriber– so make sure to check it out.

Cheers,

Jared