Malurus melanocephalus melanocephalus (Red-Backed Fairywren)

IUCN Status: Least Concern

This is another species I’ve been chasing for a while. They’re quite common birds and I know of many places around where I can see them. However photographing them is difficult for two reasons. First, the typically live in undergrowth, and hang out in very “busy” environments, which means photographs of them often have obstructions in front, or distracting backgrounds behind. Second, their extremely dark colouration tends to confuse the automatic metering as the camera struggles to expose the background right and underexposed the animal, or exposed the animal and over exposed the background, or tries averaging the two and gets both wrong.

This was taken in a situation where I had some control over the perch, by playing this species call, and in good light with some flash to light the exposure of the dark bird.