I got this inquiry after my recent bird photography post.
They were referring to this insane crop I did of this photo.
This cardinal photo was shot on my Canon 80D. A crop sensor. The 6D has a bigger sensor with more dynamic range than the camera that took the photo they're asking about.
Which means the answer probably isn't their gear.
Here was my thought process when capturing these bird photos...
I didn't know where the birds were going to land.
So I started shooting wide.
I knew my reach was limited.
So I knew I was going to crop.
Cropping magnifies noise, which reduces detail.
So I needed my ISO as low as possible.
I needed a lot of light.
So I provided additional light with a flash.
In the end, I did use Topaz to upscale and sharpen the photo, and that did add a bit of clarity, but sharpening is often a garbage in > garbage out situation. You need to capture good detail in the original photo. And if you try to oversharpen a photo with low detail, it just gets chunky and ugly.
Topaz is a professional noise reduction, upscaling, and sharpening tool, but most image editors have decent sharpening tools that can give similar results.
At normal viewing distances, the effect is subtle. You have to magnify almost 400% to see a huge difference.
Magnified...
You can see that the unsharpened version was not noisy and the lens rendered the detail very well.
So, the question is... how do you capture good detail from the start?
I have compiled a list of 11 variables to consider when trying to capture maximum detail and sharpness. These are somewhat in order of priority, but certain variables may be more important depending on the circumstances.
I created a short version and a longer, more nuanced version under the cut.
The 11 Tips (Condensed)
1. Light
Detail is light versus shadow. Raking, directional light coming in at an angle will reveal more detail and microcontrast. Soft light, overcast days, overhead sun, and front flash can reduce perceptual sharpness by mitigating microshadows that reveal texture.
2. Subject Separation
A strong, crisp outline is a perceptual anchor for sharpness. Create subject separation using methods like background blur, underexposed background, rim light, and color separation.
3. Lens > Sensor > Distance > Magnification
Small and distant subjects need a lens with adequate magnification and sharpness. Superzooms and other low cost telephoto lens solutions may give disappointing results outside of very bright environments when the light is less interesting. Most APS-C and Full Frame cameras with 18+ megapixels are sufficient for sharp photos. Getting as close as possible to wildlife with field craft techniques is a powerful way to reduce the need for magnification. If you can't get close, then you will need a sharp telephoto lens, which typically has a high price point, even on the used market.
4. Focus
On older DSLRs, the center point is most reliable. Try focus-and-recompose and back button autofocus to help you quickly and accurately acquire focus. DSLRs can also suffer from focus misalignment that skews the DOF in front or behind the focus plane. A focus calibration tool can help you determine if your lens is back or front focusing. This can be corrected with an autofocus microadjustment or using live view mode.
5. Depth of Field
DOF creates a band of acceptable focus and making sure your subject falls within can be challenging. Don't try to nail one specific combo of settings. Take many pictures with a range of settings, starting with the safest and getting riskier from there. For example, get deep DOF with f/8 for safety, and then take the same shot with f/7.1, f/5.6 and f/4 and so on. Pick the best version later. "Correct" settings are a myth… cover your bases.
6. Shutter Speed
Camera shake can be solved with a tripod, image stabilization, or good handholding technique. Remember the reciprocal rule. Choose a shutter speed that is 1 over your focal length. For example... 50mm requires 1/50th of a second.
If the subjects are in motion and you don't have a lot of light, you need to dial in the shutter speed to their movement. A tripod won't save you. Again, start safe with more shutter speed than you need, and get riskier from there. Don't automatically exclude a shutter speed just because one frame is blurry.
7. Hit Rate
This is the number of acceptable frames within a batch of photos. To make risky settings work, you can use probability to your advantage. If 1 of 10 shots is sharp, take 50 photos to get 5 keepers. Culling through tons of photos is frustrating, but a hit rate mentality is the best way to use risky but superior settings to get sharp shots with a cleaner ISO.
8. Aperture
Two main sharpness considerations… the sweet spot and diffraction.
Every lens has a sweet spot where it is the sharpest. This is typically one or two stops down from wide open.
Every camera system suffers from diffraction blur as the aperture gets smaller. Typically f/11 and smaller will start to soften the image.
Test both in controlled settings to see how your camera and lens perform at different apertures.
9. ISO
Modern cameras have very good high ISO performance. Don't fear high ISO. However, everyone has a different tolerance for how much noise is acceptable and there is a threshold where the image degrades too much. Test your camera to see what the high ISO ceiling is.
Wildlife photography often requires heavy cropping. While high ISO can be acceptable in an uncropped image, the noise will get progressively more apparent as you increase crop magnification. If you know your image will be heavily cropped, take measures to keep your ISO as low as possible.
10. Practice, Testing, and Problem Solving
A sharp photo is a solved problem, not a lucky button press. Most great shots are the result of an iterative process… testing light, settings, focus method, and timing across many attempts. Simulate field conditions in a controlled setting, like photographing a fake bird in your backyard at different distances and lighting conditions. Even spontaneous photography runs on prior practice. Improvisation is an illusion. Build the experience before you need it.
11. Post-Processing
Make detail visible with the Highlights and Shadows sliders. Build contrast with Whites and Blacks before ever touching the Contrast slider. Use Texture and Clarity to amplify microcontrast. Tools like Topaz can help with noise reduction, sharpening, and upscaling, but processing can only enhance detail you captured.
The 11 Tips (Hyper-Verbose Edition)
1. Light
Detail is all about macro-contrast and micro-contrast (also known as acutance or texture). And it is all defined by light versus shadow. If your image is all midtones, the light and dark do not compete and we read that as flat or dull. This can also lower our perception of sharpness, even if the photo has good focus and there are no major detail-reducing factors at play.
This photo was taken by a 200 megapixel smartphone camera.
This was taken with a 24 megapixel, 10 year old camera.
An overcast day will make megapixels useless. It kills shadows and texture. But a photo taken at golden hour, when the sun is low in the sky, can bring out every beard hair and flower petal.
You might be thinking, "Froggie, you used a real camera instead of a smartphone; that's not a fair comparison."
Light is light and if the light is good, the camera matters a lot less than you think.
These are from a smartphone.
The bird shot used a fill flash angled downward at the birdbath, and the angle is everything. When light rakes across a textured surface instead of hitting it head-on, every feather barb casts a tiny shadow underneath itself. Thousands of little shadows mean tonal separation between every feather, which is what your brain reads as "crispy detail." That detail is physically created in the scene by the light. It is not something you can add later with a slider.
Flat light does the opposite. Overcast sky, high-noon sun, on-camera flash pointed straight ahead... they all hit every surface at roughly the same angle, the micro-shadows vanish, and adjacent feathers smear into one tonal blob. Same lens, same sensor, same focus accuracy. Way less perceived detail.
That said, soft light has its place. It is very flattering and the same microcontrast that enhances feather detail can also accentuate pores and blemishes. So I wouldn't use raking light to photograph humans if you want them to still like you after you take their picture.
So my first real tip is to start evaluating light by what it does to texture. Low sun, directional light, a flash skimming across the subject... these are perceptual detail multipliers. And if nature won't provide ideal lighting circumstances, you can bring a flash and provide your own light.
2. Subject Separation
Sharpness is partly a perceptual trick, and one of the biggest anchors is the outline. If your subject has a crisp, defined edge against the background, the whole photo reads as sharper. Even if the micro-contrast inside the subject is only okay, your brain locks onto the silhouette first.
There are a few main ways to get good subject separation.
Blur the background with shallow depth of field.
Underexpose the background relative to the subject.
Use rim lighting to trace a bright edge around the subject.
Use color separation by putting the subject's hues in a different family than the background so they pop apart even at similar brightness.
3. Lens > Sensor > Distance > Magnification
When shooting small or far-away subjects, like birds and other wildlife, you do need to set yourself up for success with your gear and capture technique.
You need to start with a sharp lens. In other forms of photography, you can get away with a softer lens, but subjects that are small and far away need the sharpest lens you can manage to make sure you capture all of the detail and texture from the very beginning.
You need to make sure you have a sensor that can keep up with your lens. I think an APS-C or full frame sensor with at least 18 megapixels is enough to get good results when paired with a sharp lens. Much of early digital wildlife photography was shot on a Canon 7D which matches those specs and those photos hold up to this day. Using a camera with a 1.5x crop factor like APS-C can increase your focal length while maintaining high pixel density, which allows you to increase your magnification. However, you will have a lower noise threshold in low light.
One big rule of wildlife photography is that you can never get close enough. This is often down to practice and technique. Learning about the wildlife you are photographing, their behavior, and the techniques used to know where they will be and how to get as close as possible while maintaining safety for yourself and the animal.
And finally, magnification. When you can't get any closer, you'll need your lens to help out a bit. Unfortunately, sharp lenses with a lot of magnification and a decent aperture can get extremely expensive. The current gold standard wildlife lenses cost over $10,000. There are some newer midrange and third party lenses that cost half or even a third of that. But they don't have the large apertures and are more challenging to use in low light. And there are some older lenses on the used market that can get you decent magnification on a budget.
The Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L lens is legendary in the wildlife community and can be bought used for around $1000. (Nikon shooters: the used AF-S 300mm f/4 or the 200-500mm f/5.6 VR are decent alternatives.)
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "Froggie, you're always telling us gear doesn't matter. You just showed us smartphone photos two sections ago."
Most photography gear is like a hammer. There are expensive hammers. They're better balanced, more comfortable, a little more durable. Professionals who swing one all day will appreciate the difference. But the $10 hammer still drives in the nail. If your subject is close and your light is good, nearly any camera and lens made in the last decade will drive the nail.
A sharp, high-magnification, large-aperture telephoto lens is not a hammer. It's a fighter jet. There is no such thing as a budget fighter jet. It is a specialized machine built for one extreme job. It's genuinely difficult to manufacture. Even the old used ones cost millions. The laws of physics don't offer a discount just because the price tag feels unfair.
And those "budget" super-telephoto lenses? Those are the toy fighter jets. They look like the real thing. They're shaped like the real thing. From a distance, in good conditions, they can even be mistaken for the real thing. If you only ever use them in bright sun, they can perform well enough to impress.
But they're selling empty magnification. They fill the frame with a small subject without adding visual fidelity. There's currently a $1000 800mm f/11 lens for Canon that I refer to as a "bird identifier," because that's what it's most useful for. It will confirm the bird exists. But it will struggle to make art of it, especially since it restricts you to bright overhead sunlight, which, as we covered in tip #1, is exactly the light that kills texture.
And I want to be careful here, because there are really two different hobbies hiding inside "photographing birds."
There is documenting wildlife... seeing a cool bird, capturing proof of the encounter, adding it to your list, sharing it with people who will know exactly how lucky you were to spot it. This is a completely valid hobby, and honestly, the cheap superzooms are great at it. A Coolpix P1100 with an absurd zoom range is arguably the best bird-documenting machine ever built. And if you use it in bright, favorable conditions, you might get the occasional shot worthy of printing and hanging on your wall. If that's your hobby, ignore everything I just said. You have the right tool.
And then there is artistically photographing wildlife in challenging conditions, where the goal isn't proof the bird exists, it's a beautiful image that happens to contain a bird. Light, separation, texture, composition. That's the hobby this post is about, and it's the one where the toy fighter jet falls apart, because it can document a bird in full sunlight at 300 feet, but it can't give you feather detail, subject separation, or usable files in the golden light where beautiful photos live.
Seeing a cool bird and making a beautiful photo of a bird are two distinct things. Neither one is the superior hobby. But they have very different price tags, and most of the frustration I see comes from people using the tool for one to attempt the other.
And no, teleconverters aren't the loophole either. A 2X teleconverter doubles the frame magnification, but even on high-quality glass, it might only add 10 or 20% actual detail. On a cheap lens, it can add nothing at all while crippling your light-gathering ability.
To be clear, even the "budget" options in this metaphor are still fighter jets. That used 400mm is an F-14 Tomcat that Tom Cruise was pretending to fly 40 years ago. A lot cheaper than a new F-22 Raptor, but you are still paying a thousand dollars for a 20+ year old lens with a moderate aperture and no stabilization.
If your budget is $500 for a camera and a lens, I'd love to tell you that wildlife photography can meet you there. Even buying used, I struggle to find a combo for less than $2000. I'd probably go with a Canon R7 so I'd get eye-detect autofocus and adapt the classic 400mm I mentioned.
But here's the good news... the cheapest way to buy magnification isn't glass.
It's getting closer.
Learning your subject's behavior, its schedule, its favorite perches. Using feeders, hides, blinds, camouflage, and slow movement. Setting up where the animal already wants to be instead of chasing where it is. A 300mm prime and 20 feet of fieldcraft will beat a $1500 superzoom every single time. Getting twice as close is a free 2X teleconverter, and it gets you double the detail instead of just +10%.
That's the whole trick behind my bird photos. My "reach" is a birdbath and some sunflower seeds. The birds come within 10 feet of a modest lens, and at 10 feet, that modest lens performs like the $10,000 one.
4. Focus
The 6D Mk1 has one genuinely trustworthy autofocus point... the center one. This is often the case with these elderly DSLRs.
It's the only cross-type point in that body, and the outer points get hunty in anything but bright, contrasty light. For people with older DSLRs with antiquated focusing systems, I would suggest using only that center point and employing a focus-and-recompose strategy. You half-press the shutter, hit a bullseye on your subject, and then reframe as you wish.
Modern cameras have eye-tracking autofocus and it has improved wildlife photo hit rates by an unknowably large margin, but you can still make focus and recompose work if you are patient and practice. Some employ "back button focus" to untether focusing from the shutter button.
Also worth checking is if your lens is front or back focusing. This is a problem with some DSLR cameras in which the mirror-based focusing system is slightly misaligned, so your focus ends up in front or behind the subject. Typically, this is most noticeable at close distances or with a wide open aperture (or both).
You can test your focusing pretty easily with a $5 lens target.
You set it up at 3, 5, and 10 feet. Focus at the center with your aperture wide open. Then you can see if your depth of field skews in front or behind where you focused.
If you find your camera system is not focusing the way it should, there should be an autofocus microadjustment option to help address the issue.
You can also focus in live view mode to avoid this issue.
5. Depth of Field
You need to make sure you have enough depth of field to capture your subject. Finding that narrow band of focus and making sure your subject falls within takes practice. But one pet peeve I have with photographers is this idea of nailing the "correct settings" as a badge of honor. There is this allergy to teaching people it's okay to cover your bases if you don't have confidence in your settings.
I often don't know the "correct" settings. And sometimes I don't have the time to figure it out. The little screen on the back of the camera does not have the fidelity to tell you if things are sharp in all the right places.
What I do know in those situations is the correct *range* of settings that will get me the results I want. I know the DOF is between f/4 and f/8. I know I will need a shutter speed of 1/200 to 1/400. I know my camera can handle an ISO of up to 3200.
So I don't shoot one photo with one group of settings. I shoot the safest combo of settings first, and then I push them toward better settings with a lower probability of success. So if I know f/8 and 1/400 will get me the DOF and motion freezing, I will take that shot first, even though my ISO might be 6400—above my comfortable ISO ceiling. I'll have to deal with noise reduction later, but my subject will be in focus with no motion blur.
Then I might try f/4 and 1/200. This will lower my ISO and get me a cleaner image. But these are riskier settings. The riskier the settings, the more photos you need to take. I'll talk about that more in the "hit rate" section below.
6. Shutter speed
Two different monsters here. Camera shake is solved by tripods, image stabilization, and technique. Subject motion is not. Birds are twitchy little dinosaurs. Even a "still" bird makes constant small head movements, and a tripod does nothing to address that.
If low light is a concern, start with a higher shutter speed than you think you need, check for motion blur, and keep reducing until you get nothing but motion blur. That will give you a range of shutter speeds to pick from. Again, riskier settings can work as long as you take enough shots. Which leads to...
7. Hit Rate
Your hit rate is just the number of acceptable shots within a batch. Safe settings have a high hit rate. Risky settings have a low hit rate. You are using probability to your advantage to make sure you get the photo you want.
This is the tip almost nobody puts in sharpness videos. Even with perfect technique, sharpness has variance. You might miss focus or the focus changes suddenly. A bird twitches between frames. Someone blinks. A sudden breeze makes all the leaves dance. There are so many variables happening in your frame that can cause focus, DOF, or motion issues from moment to moment. And the riskier the settings, the higher the chance those variables will cause issues.
Also, you may have a subject who is unable or unwilling to give you a good pose or expression. There is a hit rate for desired behavior as well.
The best solution to a low hit rate is to just take a shit-ton of photos.
If you need to take 10 photos to get 1 sharp one... take 50 photos, then pick the best of the 5.
If a stubborn kid will only smile in 1 of 20 photos, well... you've got a long day of culling hundreds of photos ahead of you. But when you find those 10 keepers, you'll be glad you took so many photos.
Just remember, risky settings *can* work. Don't give up after one blurry attempt.
These two photos have the exact same settings.
Sure, I have 50 blurry bird photos to deal with, but taking advantage of probability got me plenty of keepers.
The moral of the story is… digital storage is plentiful. I've taken 200 pictures of the same bridge to get 5 decent photos and 1 portfolio candidate. If you have the time and opportunity to take multiple photos with multiple settings, there is a much better chance you will get a great result.
8. Aperture
Every lens has a sweet spot, usually a stop or two down from wide open. But the trap on the other end is diffraction. On a 20MP full-frame like the 6D, stopping down past roughly f/9–f/11 starts softening fine detail. That's physics, not lens quality. If you've been stopping down to f/13 "for insurance," you've been quietly paying for that insurance in sharpness.
You can still get great photos at f/22. I don't want to discourage using a tiny aperture if you need to. Just remember that you may pay a sharpness penalty and your ability to crop may be compromised.
9. ISO
I normally preach that people should stop fearing high ISO. Modern sensors are good, and noise at normal viewing sizes is often a non-issue, especially with noise reduction software.
That's still true. But there are two considerations you should make.
First, every system has a threshold where it falls off a cliff. On the 6D it's probably somewhere around ISO 6400. Some modern mirrorless systems can go up to 12,800 with very usable results. But it is important to do your own testing and figure out where the ceiling is for you. Tolerance of noise is subjective and it is important to know where that line is for you and your camera system.
Second, noise does not survive crop magnification. A file that looks clean at full size can look like sandpaper when you punch in, because you're enlarging the noise right along with the detail. So if you already know you don't have the reach and you're going to crop heavily, your effective ISO ceiling drops. Which means you need more light. And if you don't have enough to spare, you might consider bringing your own light to the situation.
10. Practice, Testing, and Problem Solving
The published photo is the end of a process. That's true even when the photo looks completely spontaneous.
Most of my best photos required an iterative journey to reach that point. My bird setup took me a week to dial in, and my first test shot looked nothing like what I posted.
I tested flash position. Time of day. Aperture and DOF coverage. Focus method. I took somewhere north of a hundred frames before the cardinals looked like something I'd show people.
When you see a sharp photo, you're looking at a solved problem, not a lucky press of a button.
If your interest is wildlife, buy a fake bird. Set it up in your backyard. Take photos from different distances in different lighting conditions. Try to imagine all of the scenarios you might encounter out in the field and simulate them in a controlled setting.
That drill isn't just for backyard setups, either. Even if you are on a spontaneous outing and you brought your camera along in case anything interesting manifests, you still need prior practice and experience to take a good improvised photo.
People are impressed by improv comedians because they are able to manufacture jokes in the moment, straight off the dome. But they rarely consider all of the practice and training involved before that performance.
Improvisation is an illusion.
Good street photographers practice all of the situations they may encounter. They may do pre-planning with Google Maps to scout locations and good angles. They train themselves to pick settings with muscle memory. They are lauded for their ability to take compelling photos in the moment, but they aren't improvising. They just did a Batman amount of prep work to make sure they were ready for a spontaneous capture.
To quote Allen Iverson, "We talkin' bout practice, man."
11. Post processing
There is a term, "straight-out-of-camera" or "SOOC." I have no issue with it as a workflow, but it is often treated as a badge of honor.
"Real photographers don't need to process their photos."
SOOC is held up as more authentic. More "true-to-life," a sign of superior skill compared to people who use Photoshop to fix their photographic sins.
That attitude is hogwash.
SOOC just means you let a robot process your photo instead of doing it yourself. You're deferring the final look of your image to the color science algorithms a camera manufacturer built to give a decent result across the broadest range of situations possible. It takes human judgment out of the loop and automates it.
There's a real skill in choosing the right color profile, settings, and white balance to get a close approximation of what a scene looked like to the naked eye. That's a legitimate workflow.
But it's still just one processing choice among several, made by whoever configured the algorithm, rather than by you, in the moment, looking at your actual photo. Calling that "more authentic" than a human doing the same job with more control isn't a technical claim. It's a status claim wearing a technical costume.
If you want a natural, true-to-life look, human-guided processing will almost always get you a better result than a fixed algorithm can, simply because you can look at this photo instead of applying the same formula to every photo.
And if you want to push the image toward something more stylized, or rescue a shot where you botched a setting, processing can do that too.
There's no shame or added valor in any of these approaches. I was a photo manipulation specialist long before I was a photographer, so I enjoy combining the two skill sets. Image editing is a place of zen for me, and I like using every trick in the book to make the photo on my screen match the one I had in my head before I ever pressed the shutter button.
But that's my process, not the correct one. Yours can be entirely different and just as legitimate.
That said, even if you have a SOOC preference and would rather be shooting than pushing sliders in Lightroom, just a few simple adjustments in a RAW image editor can improve your photo's contrast and detail far beyond your camera body's processing algorithms. You don't even have to leave the Basic panel.
SOOC JPEGs are fully baked with the camera's processing applied. Whereas RAW files are a bit dull and low contrast by design. They are meant to store as much image data as possible. They are meant to be processed.
And in order to bring out the detail you captured, it is important to know which levers bring out contrast and texture.
People often hit the contrast slider first. But I suggest using it as the very last adjustment. There are better and more refined ways to improve your contrast.
First, you want to make sure all of the detail you want is visible. This is what the Highlights and Shadows sliders are for. If there is a dark area that isn't legible, raise the shadows. If there is a bright area blown to pure white, try reducing the highlights.
The Whites and Blacks sliders are much better levers for enhancing your contrast. They just push the most extreme tones to the edge of your histogram. Your perceptual anchor for contrast is largely due to the brightest and darkest values in your image. Pushing these sliders as far as you can without losing important detail will greatly improve overall contrast.
Note that I said *important* detail. It's okay to send things into pure black or white. So many people are afraid to go beyond the edge of the histogram. Not all detail needs to survive.
This fear of not seeing *everything* has infected the HDR capture in most smartphones. We are just swimming in bland midtones.
Clarity and Texture in Lightroom are the new sharpness. In fact, I often abstain from adding sharpening because these two sliders are so powerful at enhancing microcontrast. They are midtone and local-contrast tools. They amplify tonal separation that already exists. Instead of targeting the entire photo, they just give a pop to the bits that give a sense of detail.
Just a word of warning, Texture and Clarity are some of the easiest sliders to push too far without self awareness. They can get just as crunchy as over-sharpening.
Upscaling, sharpening, and noise reduction tools like Topaz Photo can save photos in which your risky settings did not pay off. These are technically "AI" tools and there are some generative features, but the software does its best not to fundamentally alter your photo unless there is no other choice. And even then, you can decide how much AI help is applied or just use the non-AI functions.
The only time I really use the more generative features is with photo restoration work. If someone has a 100 year old wallet size photo, and they want to make it 8x10, generative upscaling needs to be involved.
But if you use best practices to make sure your images have plenty of inherent detail, you won't even need to worry about that.
Closing Thoughts
Gear is helpful, but it isn't magic. Usually, time, preparation, and effort are the real difference-makers in creating a good image.
These photos were taken with the exact same camera by the exact same photographer.
One was me saying, "Oh shit, a groundhog!" and snapping a pic before he ran away.
The other was me smushing all 11 tips into a single frame.
It required setting up a flash and an umbrella, lying in the wet grass, and patiently waiting for Otis to wander in my direction because he had important things to sniff and did not care how much effort I was putting into taking his photo.
If someone asked for a one-word answer on how I get sharp photos, I'd probably say "maximum effort."
I always give 110%.
Which is why my one-word answer has double the requested words.
I have trouble relating to folks who buy smaller and smaller cameras so they can travel light. I have very little energy to spend on photography, so when I do spend it, I overspend. If a photo needs a light, I bring the light… even to the middle of nowhere. If it needs a 7-foot umbrella, the umbrella is coming too. Give me the biggest camera, the biggest lens, the biggest light, and a tripod that is so unwieldy that you need to carry it over your shoulder like a light machine gun.
I plan the photo before I ever take it, and I will spend a week editing a single frame if that's what it needs.
It's a workflow designed around my strengths and limitations. Low volume. Maximum effort. Everything is decided in advance because I might only get one attempt.
No one has to do it that way.
I encourage everyone to learn and improve their skills, but don't worry too much about getting a perfectly sharp photo every time.
It's okay to take a blurry photo of a groundhog.
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Also, if @shinydetritus or anyone else is having issues with image sharpness, feel free to send me examples and I can help you diagnose the issue. RAW files are better, as I can see the metadata, but I can figure out what is going on with JPEGs too.
ID: a large cardboard sign on a glass door outside. The sign says, “Do NOT Let The Duck In,” in all caps. Standing in front of the door below the sign is a duck. End ID.
the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you
This is called a "superloo" and terfs are actively trying to steal this from you, in the UK they changed bathroom regulations to mean new buildings have to prioritise gendered toilets rather than build superloos.
This also upset a lot of architects and designers who like the superloos. They're also typically more like small rooms rather than having doors you can look under.
I have a friend who was strongly against inclusive bathrooms because he felt that “bathroom stalls are already really exposed due to how they’re constructed, so no wonder women don’t want men in the same bathrooms as them” and when I pointed out that we could just… build better bathrooms… with less exposed stalls, he got really quiet and then said “honestly that sounds so much better, but there must be some problem with building them like that, because otherwise wouldn’t we already be doing it?” BESTIE we are. WE ARE. Old-style bathrooms are cheaply made, poorly designed, and all around bad. Haven’t you noticed that men’s restrooms rooms get weirdly sticky? Haven’t you noticed that women’s restrooms end up with giant lines? This is because these rooms are architecturally awful. And we can do better now, because we know more! And we are!!! People are actively designing better bathrooms that address known problems, and guess what: those bathrooms are “inclusive” in the same way that curb-cuts are inclusive. It doesn’t matter if the ramp was built for a wheelchair or a stroller; it doesn’t matter if the bathrooms were designed specifically for gender inclusivity or just because fall-apart-if-you-sneeze-on-them metal stall dividers with giant ass peek gaps suck. We can in fact improve our built environment to better meet our needs. Stop cutting off your nose to spite your face; stop settling for less just because someone else might also enjoy it.
Seattle's SEA-TAC airport has an all gender restroom that's a row of about a dozen fully enclosed separated little rooms that lock, with a shared bank of sinks and it's great. Love it. Lot of very strange encounters at the sinks, feels odd the first few times! But people laugh it off almost instantly. Because it's not actually a big deal to share a sink.
Ooooh, we have a bunch of really fancy pedestrian traffic lights in Germany! I need to share:
Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):
The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:
Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):
Traffic light lady in Bremen:
Karl Marx light in Trier:
Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:
Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):
A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:
Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:
Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:
Also like to point out that when her mother says “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid,” (translation: I had you when I was your age) you have to remember her father’s words: “earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” (translation: all the other children died.) The whole plot point of Juliet being an only child is explained by her mother being a Margaret Beaufort type who had her first child too young and it damaged her past the point of being able to bear more children.
Margaret Beaufort died in 1509. She was a major player in the Wars of the Roses, the swirling on-again-off-again civil wars that consumed England from 1455-1487. Romeo and Juliet was written and first performed in the early 1590s. Your average English person of Shakespeare’s day would probably have had at least a vague understanding of who she was and what happened to her, because she was a key figure in recent history and was still getting passed around as a cautionary tale.
There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.
The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.
You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.
Shakespeare is telling us “yeah, this is fucked up. but even if you’re the kind of awful person who doesn’t think girls marrying too young is morally wrong, it’s also a problem for practical and dynastic reasons, don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”
another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)
i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?
I've been thinking about this play a lot lately. I really wanna highlight that Lord Capulet asks Paris to wait and get to know her, and to woo her, while Tybalt lives. While Tybalt is alive, Juliet has something of a reprieve, and her wellbeing as his only child matters more to Capulet. But once Tybalt has died, the gloves come off. Lord Capulet was worried about his daughter's wellbeing when he felt he had the space to care, but as soon as his dynasty is at stake, as soon as this becomes larger than Juliet's happiness, his consideration for her health and mental wellbeing get thrown away. Which also is due in part to the fact that Capulet's family is implicated in a brawl that has left several dead after the Prince's family EXPLICITLY told the Capulets and Montagues to stop fighting or face dire consequences, AND Capulet is trying to align himself with the Prince's family by marrying Juliet off to County Paris, a relative of the Prince. So to Lord Capulet, it is now less important that Juliet is happy, and more important than he reminds the Prince of his loyalty via this marriage and aligns his family with the Prince's before it's too late. And he believes this must be done, at any cost...until Juliet kills herself. And that's when he realises the devastating cost of treating his family as chess pieces. He realises his wrongdoing far too late.
Seriously Romeo and Juliet is HEAVY on the dynastic politics, and I think you can't fully understand the play without understanding how that all works, especially because the impact of dynastic marriages on women and girls is like. THE POINT of the play
okay, for those interested, here is a full timeline of how we got to Count Binface:
1977: Star Wars is released, featuring, of course, Darth Vader
(Pictured: Darth Vader)
1984: Director Todd Durham releases his Star Wars parody movie, Hyperspace, featuring Darth Vader inspired villain Lord Buckethead.
(Pictured: Hyperspace poster featuring two Jawa-esque aliens flying through space in a shopping trolley.)
1987: Hyperspace is released on video in the UK, under the new title Gremloids.
(Pictured: Gremloids cover in the style of the original Star Wars poster, featuring Lord Buckethead.)
To promote the film, Mike Lee, the owner of the distributing company, ran for parliament as Lord Buckethead. He ran in Margaret Thatcher's constituency, Finchley, in order to get on TV. Lord Buckethead was representing the Gremloids party.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with Margaret Thatcher.)
1992: Gremloids is re-released. Lord Buckethead rides again, this time against prime minister John Major in Huntingdon. (Here's a fun fact about Huntingdon: I was born there! :D) 87/92 Buckethead seems to have leaned pretty hard into the space supervillain thing, with campaign promises including 'demolish Birmingham to build a spaceport'.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with John Major. Other notable candidates include Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.)
2017: comedian Jon Harvey, having recently watched Gremloids and learned of Lord Buckethead's candidacy for parliament, decides it's a great bit. He runs against Theresa May in Maidenhead. 2017 Buckethead seems to have a wackier and also more political approach, with campaign promises ranging from nonsense like 'nationalise Adele' to gesturing at actually sensible policies with stuff like 'lower the voting age to 16 and restrict voting after age 80'.
He also made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As with his previous incarnation, he was a member of the Gremloids party.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead dabbing on stage with Theresa May.)
2018: Director Todd Durham asserts his legal ownership of Lord Buckethead. Jon Harvey opted not to go to court over Buckethead and handed over the reins. Todd Durham extended an invitation to anyone who wanted to be the 'authorised' Lord Buckethead.
(Pictured: the new Lord Buckethead.)
2019: Lord Buckethead, now played by journalist David Hughes, stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK's pre-existing gag candidate party. He ran with a similarly silly manifesto as the 2017 incarnation, but with a bit less of a political edge. His promises included 'All doorways to be increased by 1 foot (30 cm) in height' and 'Nigel Farage to be sold for parts'.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead and Count Binface square up.)
Meanwhile, Jon Harvey in his new persona Count Binface, also ran against Boris Johnson. Buckethead and Binface face off! Binface ran as an independent with a manifesto once again blending silly and semi-serious promises such as 'nationalising model railways' and 'giving £1 trillion a week to the NHS'. This was also I believe the debut of his promise to 'move the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position'.
(Pictured: Count Binface presenting the offending hand dryer, inconveniently close to both the sink and the urinals.)
He has a point.
2021: Count Binface runs for the position of Mayor of London for the first time, with promises such as 'London to join the European Union'. He notably finished ahead of far right party UKIP.
2023: Count Binface runs in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election following Boris Johnson's resignation. He once again gets more votes than UKIP.
May 2024: Count Binface once again runs to be Mayor of London, debuting his now iconic 'build at least one affordable house' promise. Notably, he finished ahead of far right party Britain First.
(Pictured: Count Binface with Rishi Sunak. Also pictured: Monster Raving Loony Party candidate Sir Archibald Stanton with a ventriloquist's dummy.)
July 2024: Count Binface stands in the general election, running in Richmond and Northallerton against prime minister Rishi Sunak. He debuts his promise to cap the price of 99p flakes at 99p. This is his most successful election to date with 308 votes.
(Pictured: Count Binface with Andy Burnham. Also pictured: independent candidate Robert Pownell, dressed as a fox for his own reasons.)
June 2026: Count Binface stands in the Makerfield by-election against Andy Burnham, (recently) former Mayor of Manchester running for parliament with the intention of standing in the Labour Party leadership contest.
(Pictured: Count Binface on BBC's Newsnight.)
July 2026 (this week): Count Binface announces his intention to run against Nigel Farage in the upcoming Clacton by-election. He is briefly the only other candidate in the race and by the time other candidates announce themselves the narrative of 'Nigel Farage vs Count Binface' has already bedded in. And then it was now, and then I don't know what happened.
For clarity's sake, Robert Pownall is dressed as a fox because he's an anti-fox hunting campaigner, and also he will be standing in the Farage Vs Binface election. So that's fun
After The Met returned a Roman bust connected to Phoenix Ancient Art, the question of what will happen to other works sold by the gallery to
A long read that will turn your brains right around in your head at the lengths people will go to to (a) steal stuff and (b) make loads of money at it.
I always knew gym class was a good idea for our health and wellbeing in theory but that just didn’t outweigh getting bullied about my body daily by peers and teachers alike
to be clear you are fifteen thousand generations removed from the invention of stone tools. not from the end of stone tools. modern humans are still using stone tools.
