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.
My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.
I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.
I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.
I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.
I learned to love books because my father loved them first.
How terrifying, how excruciatingly painful to acknowledge this. That I am a jigsaw puzzle of everyone I have briefly known and loved. I carry them on with me even if I don’t know it. How beautiful.
you need to get it out of your mind that psychosomatic illness is just “making up symptoms” when it’s actually much more like your body is being actively poisoned by chemicals released from your brain
if you’re so stressed that you’re puking your guts up every morning, are unable to eat or keep anything down, you can’t look at light without feeling infinitely worse and feel exhausted and in pain all the time (or whatever your particular stress induced symptom set is) you’re not just feeling like that because you’ve willed it into being. your body is begging for relief from the constant barrage of stress hormones and it requires the fundamental source of stress to go away, not just distracting yourself from the symptoms
just because the root is psychological doesn’t mean the result isn’t an entirely physical process.
Doctor, looking at my neck x-ray: “The muscles of your neck are in such spasm right now that your spine has lost its curve. No wonder you’re in such pain. What the heck did you do to yourself?”
Me: “I work on a computer all day.”
Doctor: “Ah. That will do it. Right, so here’s a script for anti-inflammatories and a muscle relaxer. Also try hot and cold on it, 15 minutes each, and then gentle movements between each round. You’ll feel better in about a week.”
Me: “In a week I’m still going to need to work on the computer.”
Doctor: “And here’s also a script for 6 months of Physical Therapy.”
Me: “In 6 months I’m still going to need to work at a computer.”
Doctor: “And take breaks and do stretches between meetings?”
Me: “They book me in back to back meetings where I work. I eat lunch at my computer. I have to excuse myself to go pee.”
Doctor: “…”
Me: “…”
Doctor: “Um… it sounds like this job is actually, literally, killing you? Can you possibly work someplace else?” *
———
*note: It wasn’t said as flippant advice, and the doctor was 100%. right. After I got a different job — which took a WHILE — it was in a different corporate culture, one that didn’t believe in filling the day with meetings. I was able to do the stretches I was supposed to do, and also walk at lunch, and my neck is much better now. Not everyone has this choice. But maybe, if your job is killing you too, start thinking about an escape plan. Your body will eventually turn you into a pretzel otherwise. Nothing psychosomatic about that.
I pull up my slide show. The first slide says “I do not want to financially support the Church of the Latter Day Saints in any way”. There are murmurs of agreement and approval from the room
Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone
“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’
I’m sweating. The following slides explain tithing rules. The vibe of the room has shifted. I start to doubt I’m getting out of here alive
Originally, the Chinese translation of Kamek's threat to Mario in Super Mario Galaxy had him telling Mario to go to hell, which was removed later.
Top: in the intro to Super Mario Galaxy, Mario manages to hold onto Peach's Castle as it is lifted up into space. However, Kamek appears and blasts Mario away with the words "So long! Enjoy your flight!"
Bottom left: in the 2018 Chinese Nvidia Shield port of Super Mario Galaxy, Kamek tells Mario "永别啦!下地狱吧!", which translates roughly to "Goodbye forever! Go to hell!"
Bottom right: in the Nintendo Switch version, which was a new translation into Chinese, Kamek now says "你就给我在地上打滚吧!" which translates roughly to "Go roll on the ground!", removing the harsh wording of the original translation.
Source: chinesenintendo, cometobservatory
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I heavily recommend getting very good at spotting Meta glasses. Like I'm talking so good all you need is a glance. Otherwise, I would go about public life bearing in mind that more and more people are wearing expensive camera glasses that can record you without you realizing.
Learn how to identify smart glasses through visual cues, behavioral patterns, and recording indicators. Handle privacy concerns with this pr
Ready or not, the smart glasses future is upon us.
With smart glasses, there are concerns around being recorded. Fortunately, you can watch for indicator lights and certain movements as a way
Here are some basic primers. If someone is wearing what look like Meta glasses, they usually have a small circular camera in the outer corners of the lenses, like the one on your phone.
I would also regularly check their own product pages so you're on top of what the models look like. They tend to have larger frames, but come in a variety of shapes and colors.
Shop every style. Every color. Prices from $299 to $499. Browse Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta AI glasses and sunglasses to find your pair.
The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film p
A new hobbyist developed app warns if people nearby may be wearing smart glasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which stalkers and harassers have repeatedly used to film people without their knowledge or consent. The app scans for smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signatures and sends a push alert if it detects a potential pair of glasses in the local area.
The app comes as companies such as Meta continue to add AI-powered features to their glasses. Earlier this month The New York Times reported Meta was working on adding facial recognition to its smart glasses. “Name Tag,” as the feature is called, would let smart glasses wearers identify people and get information about them from Meta's AI assistant, the report said.
Not necessarily, because Meta has military contracts (source 1, source 2, source 3), is testing surveillance tech on their own employees and their customers (source 4, source 5), and there are at least two class action lawsuits against them for privacy violations (source 6, source 7, source 8). There is also some sketchy stuff about workers being forced to review material, which may or may not be used without the customer's permission, that is sensitive, graphic, and/or pornographic (source 9).
The American Foundation for the Blind has said that "The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are an accessibility tool only by coincidence. That makes them more affordable and, in many ways, unaware of the needs of users with reduced vision" although they do have seemingly positive views on Meta Glasses as a whole. (source 10). It also seems like their marketing push as accessibility devices began last year (source 11).
But to add even more into the nonsense, Meta is now toying around with adding a "limit" to the functionality of their glasses unless their users pay for more access (source 12). AND, as stated above, Meta has officially added facial recognition code in their glasses and only admitted it after being called out, which is basically the death of privacy as we know it (source 13, source 14, source 15). And oh look another lawsuit because of it (source 16) THAT THEY LOST (source 17)!
Long story short: I don't begrudge someone using them as a disability aid overall, but ultimately both their privacy and other people's privacy are being disregarded by Meta and that is not and should not be acceptable by any means.
I understand there is no ethical consumption under capitalism but there is a level of personal responsibility someone has to take when using them if they truly truly need them, such as opting out of sharing information, not filming strangers without permission, not posting footage of strangers online, opting out of facial recognition if possible, etc.
Disabled people deserve assistive technology AND privacy rights, and Meta is not the solution.
Donkey Kong Country Returns HD added Dixie Kong as a playable character in an update. Due to the original game never being designed with Dixie Kong's powerful ability to reach high ledges in mind, this addition causes glitches resulting from her allowing Donkey Kong to reach previously unreachable areas.
Top: in level 6-3, Weighty Way, a segment normally requires Donkey Kong to destroy a cactus, which creates a Barrel Cannon leading into the background. The background puzzle ends in him being shot back into the foreground on a higher ledge to the right. The level is designed so that the ledge is unreachable without going into the background in the original game. However, here, Dixie Kong allows Donkey Kong to easily skip to it.
Middle: if Donkey Kong goes back to the cactus after completing the puzzle, it produces a different Barrel Cannon that shoots him to the right instead. By skipping the puzzle, the cactus now spawns both Barrel Cannons at once, which add their effects together when Donkey Kong is shot out. This results in him landing in the foreground, but then instantly teleporting to the same spot in the background, killing him in the process.
Bottom: a slowed-down, zoomed in view of what is happening.
Source: SoulofStalker
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