Black-necked stilts, a very different lighting scheme

Bird photographers tend to think pretty traditionally about lighting. In particular, a general rule is that the sun is supposed to be behind one’s shoulder, placing frontal lighting on the bird to avoid shadows. While this type of lighting does produce nice portraits, making images with an artistic flair requires a bit of out of the box thinking. One way to do this is to shoot into the sun.

While at one of my favorite dry forest bird photography spots here in Costa Rica, I went down to some salt ponds to photograph the abundant water birds that congregate there to feed. Black-necked stilts were there, and I immediately set out making some nice portraits of them with the sun at my back and the water a nice dark greenish color. But then I decided to walk around to the other side of the pond, thinking that shooting into the sun would give such a strong reflection on the water that I could choose intentionally to portray it as a white sheet. When shooting into the sun, the subject usually will be rendered as a dark silhouette, but by intentionally overexposing the scene, I was able to let the water go entirely white while exposing the birds properly. It gave a very different, graphic look and resulted in one of my favorite bird images.

Tech specs: Canon 20D, Canon 300 mm f2.8 L IS lens, 2x teleconverter, handheld, ISO 200, f13, 1/800 second, aperture priority, +1.3 exposure compensation

Cheers,

Greg