Capture the Beauty: Mastering Exposure for White Birds

^{Note: This tip comes from Audubon’s article - How to Photograph White Birds}

One of the great things about bird photography is the seemingly endless diversity of colorful subjects. But while birds such as the Painted Bunting are certainly eye-catching, images capturing the elegance of predominantly white birds, such as the Great Egret can be just as spectacular.

When photographing white birds, we want to portray their brilliance while preserving their plumage's subtle and often intricate detail.

This can be a delicate balance and often frustrates beginning bird photographers. 

Exposure theory tells us that if we devise camera settings that render a gray bird as gray, those exact same settings will work for a white bird in the same light. 

While this is true, there is far less room for error with bright white subjects: Underexposing will make them appear too dull, and overexposing even a little can cause a complete loss of detail in the highlights.

Tip #1 – Turn on the Highlight Alert function

By enabling highlight alerts and or “blinkies” on your camera, any areas that have lost highlight detail—the detail hidden in the brightest part of a scene—will blink during image playback. Many cameras will also show the highlight clipping in your viewfinder before you take the picture allowing you to adjust exposure on the fly.

Blinkies are both accurate and reliable and can be used to your advantage.

Take test shots in manual mode with increasing exposure levels until you see blinkies on the subject, and then reduce the exposure by one-third or two-thirds of a stop.

You can now use these locked-in settings to get the optimal exposure regardless of the subject’s background or size in the frame, as long as the amount of light hitting the subject remains constant. If and when the light changes, again take test shots to devise new settings.

This method is not the most efficient or elegant, but it is simple and very effective.

Tip #2 – Use Spot Metering

Use the camera’s exposure meter to guide you to the correct camera settings. 

Choose a spot metering pattern that yields more predictable and consistent results than patterns like matrix or evaluative.

Fill the spot metering area with white from the brightest part of the subject and adjust the camera settings until the exposure scale in the viewfinder reads +2. 

This should be very close to optimal, but you may be able to go one or two-thirds of a stop more without losing highlight detail. You could also be one-half to one stop less and still capture the brilliant highlights.

This control of the upper end of the histogram scale is known as ‘shooting to the right’ and it will provide maximum benefits when you adjust the tones in post-production.

As with the previous method, you can fire away with these locked-in settings regardless of background or subject size until the light changes.

When this happens again, fill the spot metering area with white plumage and adjust the camera settings to get back to the same reading on the exposure scale. Once you have used the meter as a guide to lock in the correct exposure, you can ignore the exposure scale while you are shooting— (AS LONG AS YOU ARE IN MANUAL MODE!) the viewfinder will indicate exposure bouncing all over the place as your Spot metering area falls over different parts of the scene.

Want more? If you want to learn more about bird photography, and capture beautiful shots of your own, we recommend downloading and printing out Photzy’s 10 Bird Photography Cheat Sheets (Special bonus available now!)