This is a male eclectus parrot I photographed in Papua New Guinea. I don't use flash very often when photographing birds or wildlife because it looks somewhat unnatural, but in this case I had little choice. It was very dark in the jungle, and I took this a few years ago with the Canon 5D Mark II which had fairly pronounced noise by today's standards. Therefore, I didn't want to use a high ISO, and flash enabled me to keep the ISO, and therefore the noise, at a minimum. Fill flash is essentially two separate exposures. I balanced the flash on the bird with the ambient light on the background by using the camera's manual exposure mode and while the Canon 580EX flash was set to eTTL. My settings were 1/60, f/8, and 400 ISO. Notice the shutter speed is slow for the 200mm focal length I was using. I had to do that to expose correctly for the background.
0 Comments