Last week I wrote about controlling and simplifying backgrounds to feature the bird as the focus of the image. What you exclude from an image often adds more than what you include – less is usually more when it comes to the bird images I strive for.

This week we go the next level and exclude everything from the background by pushing it to white. I have always been inspired by the painted illustrations in bird guides and seek out opportunities to recreate this look photographically and feature some in my Birds on White Gallery. In nature this usually relies on finding a flat grey sky or its reflection in smooth water. Neither of these opportunities arise in a backyard setup so I needed to make a background that I could use to achieve the goal.

The simplest way to achieve this was to hang a piece of white cloth from branches behind the perch and weight it with a metal tube. This gave a smooth surface that didn’t flap or wrinkle in a breeze. Setting my exposure manually to achieve +2 stops when metered off the cloth gave me a clean white background to the image. The birds were a little wary at first but soon ignored the addition and the above photo was actually taken with my Fuji X100F standing in full view just a couple of metres from the bird.

Bird photos with Nikon D850 and Nikon 500mm f4VR lens.