People have noticed a few similarities between my two winning images from last year – they’re (mostly) white birds on (mostly) white backgrounds! I’ve been asked why and how I make these images, so I thought I’d do a post about it.
We’ll start with why. Dad has a beautiful gallery of Birds on White images, some of which adorn the walls of our house. His inspiration is the illustrations in bird guides, those wonderful paintings that showcase the beauty of the birds. I used to spend hours looking at those illustrations, learning about all the different birds and dreaming of seeing them in the flesh (feather?). The detail and delicacy of the images always captured the essence of the birds, and it’s something I attempted a lot in sketching and painting. I never felt that I got it quite right, so it’s still something I’m working on. I photograph a lot more than I paint now, but I haven’t given it up and with lots of practice maybe I’ll get there one day.
Why white birds, though? The first image I took just happened to be the mostly white White-fronted Tern, but I like the challenge of exposing white birds correctly. If they’re a little overexposed they disappear, and if they’re underexposed they turn grey. I know both of those problems are quite easily rectifiable in post-processing, but there’s an achievement in getting a perfectly exposed image that I constantly strive for.
So trying to capture images like that in camera is something that I enjoy. It’s taken a few years for me to be confident enough with manipulating the exposure to do so, and it requires either working in Manual mode, or making use of the Exposure Compensation controls in Aperture Priority. If you let the camera figure it out for you in Aperture priority, you’d get an underexposed image because the camera tries to make the image ‘properly exposed’, a nice bell curve on the histogram. This isn’t what we want.
The first thing you need is a background – overcast days are good as they give you a grey sky that you can overexpose to white, and you can do the same with water that is reflecting the sky. It also gives you lovely soft light that eliminates shadows in which detail would get lost.
The second thing you need is the correct exposure, remember you want to overexpose slightly so the background is white, but not so much that you lose detail in the bird – especially if it’s a white bird. Here’s the two examples, with the capture details below. The Egret was shot facing directly upwards, so a slower shutter speed was needed to make sure the bird was exposed properly (it was also flying much more slowly than the Tern was!).
The third thing you need is a bird. I think that much is pretty obvious though, so I’ll leave that up to you!
The best way to make this kind of image? Practice. Get out there and see how it works, overexpose your backgrounds, but not so much that you begin to lose the edges of the subject. They’re very rewarding images to make. The best ones capture the personality of the bird, or it’s behaviour. Given the right elements, they can also work well in monochrome. They’re a challenge, but it’s worth it!
