To my eyes, there's no discernible difference between those two shots. What that tells me is that the ambient daylight in the shot completely overpowers your fill light. In other words I think your fill light is having no visible effect here. My guess is your light is coming from all directions suggestive of hazy or overcast conditions rather than, say, clear sky with very hard unidirectional light. You mentioned that in some of your shots the bird is backlit only and is almost or entirely silhouetted. That is what I was addressing in my comment because in a case like that your fill light could be used to give some definition to the otherwise black silhouette side facing us. Now, if this works and your added fill does light up the silhouette side, then if the backlight is from sunlight, that's 5600K, and your fill is tungsten, 2800K, then this colour temperature difference could be visible and "look lit". On Sat, Aug 8, 2026 at 1:30 PM John Sessoms <jsessoms002@nc.rr.com> wrote: > > I don't think you can either. But that's not what we were looking for. > > Does the fill light introduce UN-natural looking color into the image? > > Does the image WITH the fill light have obvious artificiality that is > absent from the comparison image taken without the fill light? > > On 8/4/2026 9:01 PM, Larry Colen wrote: > > I don't think you'll see a lot of obvious difference between 6400 and > > 8000, that's like 1/3 of a stop. -- -bmw