Flash in the Land of Sunshine?
October 2006
Flash in the Land of Sunshine?
Australia’s the land of sunshine, isn’t it? Then why am I using my electronic flash more here than I do back home? Actually, because there’s too much light! In the dry season, there’s little cloud to soften and diffuse the light, so lighting conditions get harsh soon after sunrise. By then the rainforest, where many potential subjects live, is deeply shadowed. Even on forest edges the birds are often backlit against the sky. No chance of using natural light there.
So I’m forced to use flash, usually in combination with the ambient light. That’s how I photographed this Spectacled Monarch, a lively songbird that fans its tail as it forages through the rainforest. I used a relatively high ISO (640) to get a fast enough shutter speed to stop the bird’s movement, then added ETTL fill-flash at minus 2/3 stop under the suggested exposure. Including the ambient light avoids the black backgrounds so typically of heavily flashed bird photos.
For this secretive Red-necked Crake, I was forced to use flash for the entire illumination of the scene, since the bird only came out at dusk. It was too dark for autofocus to function, so I struggled to manually focus, barely able to see the bird myself! Exposure, both camera and flash, was done manually because using autoexposure would have grossly overexposed this dark scene. I set the ISO to 320, shutter speed at 1/250 second, then set my flash power to give me a correct illumination at 60 feet, the distance away from me that I expected the bird to arrive. I made many images, but this was one of the few that were sharply focused. The bird’s eye pupil was darkened post-capture to give a less flashed look.
Why the difference in camera settings? Using flash as fill, it’s a combination of flash and ambient light that produces the correct exposure. Using flash in manual mode (in essence, flash as main light) it’s the distance from flash to subject that produces the correct exposure. No more technical stuff—I promise!