Fill flash works for bird portraits, too.

I’m not taking as many bird portraits as I have been over the last 18 months. I have over 1,500 portraits but the overwhelming majority of them cover about 50 species. I still enjoy it very much, but unless I can capture something unique about the bird or its behavior, I’ll probably pass. That really doesn’t have much to do with today’s post – just sharing why you may see a lot less birds. (Unless I get bored and have nothing to shoot!)

Now on to today’s post – fill flash. It can work for bird and wildlife photos, too. My set up is pretty simple. About 5 feet away from my perch I placed a Canon 550EX flash and remote trigger on a pole. I positioned my camera and perch in line with some fall leaves in the background. This gave the composition a warm feeling. Because the background was slightly brighter than the subject area, I opened up the aperture by 2/3 f-stops. Then I set the flash at -1.33 f-stops to help fill in the shadows and provide a tiny catchlight in the eye. Below are two results. If you decided to try fill flash for your wildlife photos you will need do a little trial and error and adjust your settings as needed to achieve a natural effect. Had I used “auto” mode the image would have looked totally unnatural being lit solely by the flash and the background would be rendered very dark. Feel free to share your thoughts by clicking on the photo.