How to prevent a silhouette (1 Viewer)

When I take a photo of a bird on a wire or tree and its high looking towards the sky, everytime the bird appears in the photo as a silhoutte. Those birds are often most interesting but I can never get a decent photo of any.

Shirley Roulston said:

When I take a photo of a bird on a wire or tree and its high looking towards the sky, everytime the bird appears in the photo as a silhoutte. Those birds are often most interesting but I can never get a decent photo of any.

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Its all to do with the metering -when you are pointing towards the sky the camera is exposing mainly for the light sky so any darkish bird that is small in the frame will be underexposed (although you will have a perfectly exposed sky!!!!). To counteract this you need to dial-in some + exposure compensation. Just how much comes with experience and also depends on the metering mode you use. Next time try dialling in say Ev +2 - this will result in a much better exposed bird although the sky may well be over exposed. After a while you will get to learn just how much compensation to dial-in for any given scenario. It will also help if you play around with the various metering modes to understand how they work - example, partial or spot will expose more for the bird and less for the sky than, say, evaluative as the metering area is smaller.

Roy has given you the answer for solving this problem with a dslr, where it's possible to make such manual adjustments. If you have a bridge camera I don't know whether you get the same control.

Also, different camera manufacturers use different terminology for different metering modes, so if you find the instructions given difficult to follow it might help if you tell us which camera you are using.

Andrea

Thanks to you both, I have practising Roy and the results are great. I have a 7d with 400mmf5,6l , heavy for myself to pan so I use a monopod. Now to start searching for more birds, thanks again.

I took this Song Thrush with increased light, I'm pleased that the photo is getting better.

Shirley Roulston said:

I took this Song Thrush with increased light, I'm pleased that the photo is getting better.

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Looking good Shirley :t:

Do be afraid of silhouette's... they can be effective in some situations.
See the attached for an example.

Pete

You should use spot metering or adjust the ev +/- button until the desired exposure is reached. The way to do that depends on which camera you're using.