Not only was it the third time I was joining the highly acclaimed pro nature photographer Konrad Wothe for this Saturday’s walk through the Munich zoo Hellabrunn, organized and made possible as usual by the VHS Garching, but it was also the third time we had tremendously beautiful sunshine all day. Now, I do not know what kind of pact he has to guarantee this given that the dates are set 9 months in advance, but as you by now also may know – sunshine can be a bad thing when it comes to photographing animals. Especially dark furry ones.
The zoo does not open before 9 am – which is ok since it made it possible even for me to be there in time – but the sun is already quite strong and high at this time of year. The challenge was in today’s workshop to cope with this certainly not easy lighting situation, and deploy flash wherever required. Yes, flash in bright sunlight is your friend!
And it indeed were to become the first day I wanted my beloved D70 back instead of the D300, but more on this later.
We started out trying our skills in the strong backlight situation we encountered entering the zoo via the Western gate (and looking towards the sun). The results for our models, the deers, a coincidental wren, the pelicans, and the snow goats (without their white winter fur) show that the camera’s aperture priority program does work indeed – I did just switch to matrix metering, set the aperture somewhere from 4 to 5.6, and applied only a tiny -0.3 EV exposure compensation to save some more in the highlights, and got these:
[svgallery name="hellabrunn1"]
The back-lighted fur will turn into a white rim no matter how hard you try – it is much too bright to try to keep it inside the histogram. Just let it go and burn, the images look natural despite the burned out highlights. And the automatics did well whether it was the pelican with 1/800s and f/5.6, or the wren in the dark underwood at f/4 and even 1/80s!
More to follow soon…
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