WHEN I STARTED OUT as a wildlife and conservation photographer, I never used additional lighting. Over time, I started playing with flash here and there, adding one light, then sometimes two. As my skills improved, I began using flash more and more frequently, but only in the field, only during the daytime, and only as ‘fill’.
Fill light exposes dark areas of a subject to reveal more detail. Of course, there are lots of other reasons to use flash: to control the direction of light; the colour of light; the amount of light on your subject; and how dark the background is. And there are more ways than flash to do this, such as reflectors, strobes or LED panels. But for me, I used it simply because I liked the result of a little fill now and then.
Then one night about six years ago, I was photographing the little penguins of Melbourne, trying to capture their silhouettes in the darkskyline. Not far from me was a group of tourists trying to photograph the birds before they entered their burrows. Some were using on-camera flashes, others just their mobile phones, with the built-in flashes going off.
