Have you ever looked at some of the best photographs by top wildlife photographers and wondered "How on earth did they do that!!" The best photographers always understand light and take every advantage they can to make sure their light is good, their subjets are well exposed to reduce noise and above all make sure their subjects are the brightest thing in the frame. This ensures that the subject you are capturing is the focal point of your shot. There is nothng more distracting than having a poorly exposed bird and a bright area elsewhere in your photo distracting the viewer from what they are supposed to be looking at.

You have probably seen clips of top fashion photographers outdoors in daylight using flash when photographing models. You may ask why? There is lots of light so why do they need a flash? The answer is simple and encapsulated in two words. Fill flash.

Even in daylight, if you have a flash lighting up your model when you are photographing him or her, they become just that little bit brighter. It makes them stand out, increases contrast and allows you to drop your exposure ensuring your background is richer in colour and not as washed out.

In this article we look at extending this technique to bird photography. We look at what sort of flash to use, how to set it up and how to use it for bird photography.

The flash

The first and most important thing is the flash you are using. You need to consider its light output and its synch speed. These are the two most important things governing wether the flash will work for you or not.

The first thing you will want is a flash that has a reasonably bright output. You will be using it outdoors during daylight so you need it to have some effect on our subject. This is particularly ture considering you are not going to point it directly at your subject. This will cause the light to be very harsh, cause the subject to look clearly light up by a flash and ruin your photogrpah. The number you are worried about for a flash is the GN or guide number. This gives you an indication of how bright a flash is or in other words, how good it's reach is in outdoor situations. The flash I find pretty effective is the Godox TT685. This has a guide number of 197 on ISO 100 at 200mm.

It is quite a complex topic if you want to delve into it in a lot of detail. Rather than write all of that here, you can read this article for a detailed explanation.

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The flash also needs to be adjustable in terms of brightness. This is done with the exposure compensation setting on your flash. A good flash can be set anywhere from -3 to +3. This you will adjust to fine tune the amount of flash you want in your photo based on looking at the results. A good guide would be -1.5 if you are pointing the flash at the subject and +2 or even up to +3 if you are bouncing it off the reflector.

The final and most important thing is synch speed. You MUST get a flash that supports high speed synch and you MUST turn it on. If you do not, as soon as you attach your flash, the camera will be limited to 1/250th of a second shutter speed. For birds this is very limiting. With high speed synch on, you can use your flash up to much higher speeds.

Pointing and setting your flash

Now that you have your flash and you have it attached to your camera how do you use it? First let's look at pointing it.

There are two main ways of getting the light from the flash too your subject. You can either point the flash directly at the subject or you can pop up the little white reflector card that all decent flashes have. Let's look at what happens in both scenarios and how to set up the flash for our shot.

By pointing the flash directly at your subject, you will get a lot more light from the flash onto your bird. This is wonderful in theory but it has some drawbacks. Firslty pointing your flash directly is great for night photogrpahy. In such scenarios you want as much light as you can get and your flash is the only light source. This however is not fill flash. Fill flash is the technique of adding extra lighting to augment your matural light to give you subject mor pop and get some catchlight in the eye to make them really come to life.

If you point your flash directly at the subject two things will happen. Firstly you will get a lot more light from your flash and secondly you will get very high contrast with strong shadows. In certain creative settings this may be great but in general for bird photography this will not be very pleasing on the eye.

In this example you see the results of direct flash. The image is not over exposed but the lighting is quite harsh and the shadows are very strong. Overall this is not a very pleasing look. Even if you dial back the flash level, it will still give you a very harsh look.

When light is reflected off a surface it becomes polarised. This softens the light and results in light that is not as harsh and this is ideal for photography. The simplest way to achieve this is to point your flash up rather than at the bird and raise the white reflective card on your flash.

In doing this, you loose a lot of light which goes straight up rather than shining on your subject. This is a small sacrifice to make for much softer and more pleasant lighting.

If you look at the second image of the nesting hadeda, using a reflector significantly improves the quality of your image. You will have to boost the flash power much higher and you would probably need to use a setting closer to +2 to +3 on the flash exposure compensation.

Flash 2.0 - Remote triggers

Once you have mastered this technique you can take your bird flash photography to the next level with flash stands and a remote trigger.

When you encounter a situation with a bird who's movements are predictable and dependable, you can start expanding the technique. Take for example a bird approaching a nest in flight from the same angle. You could put a remote trigger on your camera and have your flash setup on a stand. This allows you to place the flash exactly where you want, to control its brightness and the effect it has on your photo. You could even go as far as using multiple fill flashes to really extend the art.