Bright Background Challenges For Wildlife Photographers

February 09, 2014  •  Leave a Comment

Photographing wildlife, or any other subject for that manner, in a high contrast scene with a bright background is very challenging.  Getting the correct exposure on the subject without "blowing out" the whites is our goal.

In today's blog post, I am going to use some photographs I took within the last few days to illustrate some of the details you need to watch for when making a photo of scenes with bright backgrounds.

I intend to make this a very high level discussion as many books are written on this subject.  In the scene below, there is a Snow Bunting perched on a shard of ice growing out of the Pymatuning lake shore.  The sun was shining bright onto the snowy scene.  The challenge here was to have the bird in proper exposure while being able to see the details in the ice form.

Snow BuntingSnow Bunting

Snow Bunting

 

Last March, I posted a blog entitled HDR Imaging For Landscapes.  In that blog, I compared the tonal range a camera is able to record to the tonal range of the human eye.  Most wildlife photography is not a good option for HDR because of the movement and unpredictability of the subject.  So, a valuable tool for us to use is the histogram. 

The histogram is a graphical display of the distribution of light in your image.  The black parts of the histogram shows where all the light is falling in the image.  The left side represents total black and the right side represents total white.  A correctly exposed image, with no loss of detail, will have a histogram that does not touch either side of the histogram.  The height of the "mountains" in the histogram pertains to the contrast but I won't get into that in this post.  In a scene with a bright background, we want the histogram to have most of the data to the right side without falling up against the end.  The histogram to the left belongs to the next photo. 

Snow BuntingSnow Bunting

Snow Bunting

 

You might be asking yourself why do you want most of the light to the right.  Again, explaining that would be a long explanation that would probably put everyone to sleep.  I'll keep it short.  A camera tries to expose the scene as 18% gray.  Photographing an 18% gray card will result in an image with the histogram having all the data in the middle as in the image to the left.  Using your default in-camera metering mode of "Evaluative", the entire scene is evaluated to come up with 18% gray.  If you have a lot of white in your scene, you need to overexpose your image a little to make the white look white.    Otherwise, it will come out in some shade of gray depending on the rest of your scene.  That is why you want the histogram data to the right.  Black subjects, like a black bear, require you to underexpose a little to render the black as pure black.

Here is the histogram for the image below.  You can see the data is spread out a little more than the last Snow Bunting image because this scene has the darkness in the rocks as part of the meter's evaluation. 

With the wind howling off the lake, the Snow Buntings lay low out of the blowing snow.

Snow BuntingSnow Bunting

Snow Buntings

 

The next photo was taken in the setting sun.  This produced a similar challenge because of the bright sky.  Applying the same corrections in the camera, I was able to get a photo without losing too much detail in the dark areas of the image.  This Bald Eagle pair are perched in a tree about 100 yards away from last year's nest.  It looks like they are going to use the same nest again this year meaning I will have many photo opportunities this spring.

Bald EagleBald Eagle

Bald Eagles

 

Although we try to get the exposure correct in the camera, it doesn't always happen.  If you become good enough in Adobe Photoshop, or a similar photo editing software, you can darken the highlights and lighten the shadows to make the scene look good.  However, remember the histogram?  Any image detail that runs off either side of the histogram is lost.  Forever!

Bald EagleBald Eagle

Bald Eagle

 

Back to the Snow Buntings.  These are fast little birds about the size of a Sparrow.  They don't let you get very close and they do not fly in a straight, predictable line.  They have one of the prettiest wingspans of the winter birds so I wanted to go home with some "bird-in-flight" images of the Snow Bunting. 

Snow BuntingSnow Bunting

Snow Bunting

 

This next image illustrates how the Snow Bunting will find shelter from the wind.  This one found a hollow spot, got in it and wiggled around to create a little hole where it sat for a period of time.

Snow BuntingSnow Bunting

Snow Bunting

 

You can view the galleries containing more images of Snow Buntings and Bald Eagles by clicking on the photos below.

Snow BuntingSnow Bunting Bald EagleBald Eagle

 

If you are interested in longer, more detailed explanations about your camera's metering system there are several books written on the subject along with many articles on the internet.

If you have any questions or would like further explanation of what I wrote, I'd like to hear from you.

Thanks for looking and come back soon.

Dan


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