The first and most important lesson in anyone’s photography education is that lighting is what divides an average photo from a great photo. Animals, unfortunately, aren’t particularly interested in posing for the camera so that the light falls perfectly on its face. For this reason, many beginning wildlife photographers simply leave lighting to luck and hope that the lighting will work out. This chapter aims at teaching beginning and intermediate wildlife photographers how to take control of the most important aspect of any photo—the lighting.
Some lighting fixes can be as simple as changing position. One of my favorite locations for bird photography is a river near my home. Having shot the location many times, I know that I need to shoot on the east side of the river in the mornings and the west side of the river in the evenings. Because the sun rises in the east, if I am positioned on the east bank at sunrise, I will have the bodies and faces of the birds front-lit with the sun to my back. In the evening when the sun sets to the west, I can similarly guarantee that the animals will be properly front-lit. Back-lighting actually has some uses, but it is generally undesirable because it leaves the face and body of the animal dull and shaded.
When shooting next to a river, photographers can generally predict where the animals will stand; however, other situations are not as straight-forward. Suppose you’re shooting wild hogs in a desert location like Texas. As you walk slowly and quietly through the underbrush, you suddenly spot a hog off to your side. It will not be possible to reposition yourself to shoot the hog in perfect light. In this situation, you’re stuck with the natural lighting conditions. In situations like these, the only way to salvage the shot is to use flash.
Flash photography is not only useful for when the light is coming from the wrong direction (such as backlighting), but also for fixing hard light. During the middle of the day, the lighting puts too much contrast on the subject. The harsh shadows caused by mid-day lighting are distracting. Fill flash can be used as a way to fill in the shadows and lessen the contrast in the lighting.
Rarely is lighting used as a primary light source in wildlife photography because it produces a dark or black background that looks unnatural. In most situations, when someone talks about using flash in wildlife photography, they mean fill flash.
Fill flash means using an underpowered amount of artificial lighting to lessen the impact of shadows. Many beginning photographers are tempted to use the on-camera flash for this purpose, but this course of action will result in devastatingly flat and unappealing lighting. Fill flash requires an external flash unit (some people refer to external flash units as “flash guns” or use the generic term “strobes”). To understand how to use flash to fill in the shadows on wildlife, some foundational principles of lighting must be laid.
Beautiful lighting has three characteristics: directionality, color, and relative size. Why is it that point-and-shoot images with flash look so flat? The flash is located only inches away from the lens and removes shadows which would show shape and texture. If the light source is moved further away from the camera—even a foot or two—the lighting casts beautiful shadows which define the subject. Therefore, the first principle of quality lighting is that it is directional, meaning that the direction from which the light source illuminates the subject will impact the overall quality of light on the subject.
The second principle of good lighting is color. Most photographers notice that when they shoot inside, their images look orange. Cameras are not as adept at changing to meet varying light conditions as are our eyes. It has to use technology to analyze whether the color temperature from a light source has a yellow, green, blue, green, or magenta color cast to it. Good lighting will match the color of the ambient light in the scene so that the lighting is cohesive rather than one light being one color and another light having a different color temperature.
The third principle of good lighting is relative size. Counter-intuitively, a light placed close to a subject produces softer light than the same light if it were across the room. The further away from the subject, the harder the light. It is not the actual distance between the light source and the subject that determines if light is hard or soft, but the relative size of the light. When the light source is far away from the subject, it looks smaller to the subject than if it were up close. Anything a photographer can do to increase the size of the light source will produce softer lighting. This doesn’t mean that you need to buy the biggest flash you can find. There are better ways of increasing the size of a flash. For example, studio photographers shoot the flash into an umbrella and let the large umbrella reflect the light back at the subject. The new light source, the umbrella, is far larger than the flash and will consequently produce a softer light on the subject.
First of all, we learned that good lighting needs to be directional. This is the reason that the built-in flash simply will not work—it is too close to the lens and will produce flat lighting. In an ideal world, photographers would put the flash ten feet off to the side of the camera and trigger it remotely like portrait photographers. Unfortunately, no animal would allow you the time to set up such a complicated lighting scheme. Instead, wildlife photographers do the best they can to get the light far away from the lens by using a flash bracket. A flash bracket, especially one made for wildlife photography, will hold the flash approximately two feet above the lens. This not only keeps the flash from being blocked by the long lens, but it adds to the directionality of the light. Another compelling reason to use a flash bracket is that it reduces the risk of red-eye in the wildlife. Red eye, which is caused by light reflecting from the eye at the same angle as the camera, will not occur if the flash is far enough away from the lens.
The second principle of light that we discussed is the color of the light. Sunrises and sunsets, which are the most common times of day to shoot wildlife photography, generally have a warm color cast to the ambient (ambient light just means the light that is naturally available) light. External flash units produce a whiter light that will not mesh in with the available light as well. This is where colored gels should be used. Gels are actually not the consistency of gel at all. Gels look like an overhead projector’s transparency and are colored to change the color of the light. A set of gels costs only $10 from any online store and will drastically impact how useful your flash becomes for wildlife photography. It’s a great thing to have in the gear bag for when its needed, but most of the time you’ll find that fill flash doesn’t require a gel.
The third principle of good lighting is relative size of the light. If it were possible to bounce the flash into an umbrella or off a wall, the lighting would be much improved; however, this is not possible for shooting wildlife photography. In fact, generally photographers are concerned with getting a flash that is powerful enough to light the subject at all. Keep in mind, however, that when the flash is set to low power in an attempt to fill in the shadows, it has a similar effect to increasing the size of the light because you use all of the size of the available light and add in the size of the external flash. So, in a way, light from a fill flash is always large.
If a photographer is in a situation where she can approach to within 15 feet, any external flash will be powerful enough to throw light onto the subject; however, due to the inverse square rule (no, I won’t bore you with it other than to say that it means that light falls off at an incredible rate as distance increases), the external flash alone will do nothing to reach an animal that is 75 feet away. When animals are further away, a flash extender is needed.
A flash extender is an attachment that goes on the end of an external flash and magnifies it. It uses a simple Fresnel lens (it’s French, so the “s” is silent: “fruh-nell”) to magnify the light and throw it ten times further than the flash alone could reach. The most popular brand of flash extender is the Better Beamer. It’s a no-brainer purchase at the fantastic price of about $35. One caution when using a flash extender with a Fresnel lens is to take it off when not in use. On a bright day, the sun will be so magnified through it that it will melt your flash. For some reason, many photographers don’t believe this warning until they have a $500 melted flash. Fresnel lenses are so powerful that slightly larger versions will melt a penny in a matter of seconds.
Quick and random wildlife photography tip!
Deer, as well as many other antlered animals such as elk and caribou, lose their antlers some time during the winter and grow them back during the summer months. If you plan on shooting a buck with its antlers, the best time is early fall. In early fall, the antlers are fully grown and are covered with “velvet” or thin fur on the antlers. This velvet on the antlers will catch any light behind it and glow around the antlers.
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