Why you need fill flash

Especially here in Germany there’s always a great discussion going on about whether it’s right to use flash for bird photography or not.  In many occasions I have been confronted with akward arguments how I could dare to use fill flash for shooting birds.

The best was something like “I can use Shadow/Highlights filter in Photoshop and get the same effect”…….

To me there are two groups. One groups that doesn’t like flash shooting at all and has ethical concerns and the other group, which just says it’s bad to use fill flash, because they don’t know how to use it. I have to disagree with both. Only in rare cases I’ve flushed a bird because of my flash. This happened mostly in situations where the birds were cautious already e.g. when having larger groups of birds at a feeder. Besides that I had very few negative experiences with it. I’d even go so far to say that in most of the mentioned cases the noise of the shutter or the lens movement would have flushed the birds, too. 75 % of the birds just continue whatever they’re doing and another 20% give you a nice pose and a great headturn after the first shot. Generally, I’d say that the greater the bird, the less cautious it will be towards fill flash.

To me using fill flash is a great way of of increasing your chances to capture incredible bird images. Without flash you would often have to pack up your gear and go home, because the conditions do not allow decent images anymore. Those conditions might be shadow, bright sun light or overcast. Further down I will post a few sample images showing the great differences of using fill flash or not in the same situation. 

Using fill flash saved me many images. Especially when shooting ducks I found it a great tool to show the iridescence of a drake’s head or to maintain detail in dark parts of the feathers. When shooting below trees it helps a lot to fight the shadows appearing on the birds.  When shooting at my feeder I only select overcast days and use fill flash to get nicely balanced and evenly exposed images. There are hundreds of situations where using fill flash saved my day and that’s also why I write this entry. I hope to be able to at least convince people that it is a necessary and “good” tool.

Below you see some images made with and without fill flash. The difference is very obvious I’d say. The upper image would be not useable and no Photoshop tool could make a decent image out of it. Whereas the lower images show a nicely exposed image. The only difference is that the lower images were made using fill flash. The rest of the settings stayed the same. Those are just Raw cnoversions and noithing else has been applied to them

 

And here a final version of one of the images.

And some more  images made with flash….

I’d love to hear your thoughts about using flash. did you have similiar experiences? Bad ones? None?

need more info? 🙂

 

I will write another article about the techniques and what you need.However, it’s quite simple, after you understand the basics.