Steve Ting Nature Photography

In my last post I posted a photo of a female Northern Flicker. I’ve been hoping that a male would come to my perch and this morning he showed up!

To set this photo up I drilled some holes in the side of a branch, then filled them with suet. After several days the birds found the suet and then I started watching to see if they had any pattern of when they were showing up. The only time they were showing up on a regular basis was just before sunup. Otherwise it was off and on throughout the day.

Since I didn’t want to sit and wait for hours until a bird came in, I chose to try for a pre-sun up shoot. Since there is no light from the sun that early I had to plan on shooting with flash. This meant using at least 2 flashes – one for the subject and one for the background. Setting up a flash set up like this sounds complicated, but once you do it a few times it isn’t really that difficult. I prefer to set my flashes on manual, since I feel that it is more predictable then using them in ETTL mode.

The set up is:

• 1 Flash on a tripod directed at the background (a tree). This flash is set on Slave mode to be triggered by the main flash.
• 1 Flash on camera for the subject and set as the Master flash.
• Exposure was ISO 400, 1/300 at f/8.0

Below is the male Flicker. The female can be seen at today’s Phlog post.