Pixiq

This hawk seems almost alive here, but I had to find the right light to… light it. The green color behind is a wall and the bird is stuffed.

I’ve been taking pictures of dead animals at a nature museum, at the wildlife area I’ve close to home, Tapada Nacional de Mafra. Not that the live animals don’t interest me (I am going out tomorrow to follow wild boars now that the piglets are coming), but this is part of a work about the museum there, used to show school children and visitors some of the animals from the area and also their habitats.

Photographing the animals had a prerequisite: not to move them from their place unless it was strictly necessary. As some of them are shown into their habitats it made sense, but for some birds, especially some birds of prey that are shown just against normal backgrounds in a big room, I could think of better solutions. Anyway, as is the case with the hawk I choose to show the technique used, I decided to use the green wall, although it is not a green that you would  easily find in nature.

When I started out defining the composition (I’ll get back to this subject on another article) I had to contend with the short distance the bird is from the wall. Using a flash from the left side I found that with the bare flash I would always had light on the wall, showing its marks and spoiling any dramatic sense I wanted to put on the image.

Keeping the camera on a tripod, with the final framing defined, I usually work placing the flash or flashes around, either in tripods, big or small, and sometimes holding a flash on my hand (you can see me on the picture, with the flash, and a small tripod I had been using until I decided to hold it for this shot) to get the light in the right place quickly.

I use the Atlas Phottix radio triggers for my flash and camera to work together, always in manual. As a starting point I define the light ratio I need so as to keep things balanced between the ambient light and the flash, and then I go from there to define the relation between the two, to get a more dark or light look, according to what I want/need.

I always use a small radio trigger for my camera, so I can work from any position as soon as I’ve everything in place. It works fine and never failed me. But here, with this stuffed hawk, I had a wall that I needed to keep dark and also the need to direct some of the light to get a more dramatic final shot of the bird. I could just use a flag to keep the light of the flash from bouncing on the wall, but I needed more, some kind of half-tube shaped channel to direct light.

It’s here that the bigger size Rogue Flash Bender from ExpoImaging came to my rescue, explaining why I always keep at least that big one inside my photobag. It works fine as a reflector, as I’ve already shown here before and also as a way to make the light go where you want it to. I just had to fold the sides a bit and I had my final light on the stuffed hawk. Work done. People at the museum really enjoyed the final image.  And I hope it will make visitors want to go and see it too, when the image goes into the book I am preparing about what can be seen and photographed in this nature area.