My photos make it look like these birds are in the midst of battle.
In reality, they charge at each other, flap their wings, and then one of them flies away. Lasts about 2 seconds per encounter. But when you use burst mode, you can freeze a moment within that 2 second battle and get some pretty neat results.
That grackle with the blue and purple iridescent head has eluded me so far. This is my first photo of him. Hopefully I can get him in focus next time.
I've got an entire scold of blue jays hanging about. I think they might be some kind of bird gang. They keep bullying other birds and each other. If I catch one of them selling bird drugs, I am going to withhold their peanuts.
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.
When I went outside with my camera, almost all of them scurried away into the darkness.
Except the littlest one.
I can't say we bonded or became friends. But he decided not to be bothered by my presence, as there were leftover peanuts about. (A blue jay knocked over the entire dish of bird food. I have since secured the dish with the power of magnetism.)
Since this little fella was not concerned with me, I was able to take my time and really dial in my lighting and settings. And I think it shows in the quality of the photos.
As you may have seen, I have been using this frog-themed birdbath as a feed bowl to attract birds for my latest photography project.
It was working well and it added a fun element to my photos.
But the other morning I went to refill the bowl with bird food and it had been knocked over and frog heads were gone.
Then I saw this.
Clearly, the groundhog was the culprit.
Lock him up.
He's guilty.
The monster even returned to the scene of the crime to admire his murderous vandalism.
Case closed.
OR IS IT?
A new suspect appears!
One of the fox teenagers has been snacking on spilled bird food.
Could he have jumped up to the bowl? Could he have knocked it over to claim more unsalted peanuts for himself?
DID HE FRAME THE GROUNDHOG?
This case is a mess. All I have is circumstantial evidence and speculation. No confession. No eyewitness to the frogicide.
What would Columbo do?
Perhaps he would set a trap so that the culprit would incriminate themselves. He might leave the birdbath filled with tasty bird chow overnight, set up a camera, and see if the groundhog or the fox take the bait and expose themselves as the villain.
JUST ONE MORE THING...
Sacrebleu!
It was a gaze of raccoons!
The fox was just a bystander!
I realize now that I wrongfully implicated the groundhog. I should have looked into his eyes, as they are pure and innocent.
I'm sorry, Mr. Groundhog. I am clearly no Columbo.
Recovery is boring. And I can't do proper photography. So I have put together a wireless setup to capture various birds while I am resting in bed. I have a security camera that alerts me to motion and I can trigger my camera with a little remote control.
These are the fruits of my project so far.
I am still tweaking things. I'd like to improve the lighting. And I'm still trying to figure out how to get the birds to land exactly where I want them to. But I think these are pretty good under the circumstances. And the cardinal couple bickering was pretty cute.
Years ago, I sold a bunch of my photo gear after my parents got sick. We needed the money and I didn't really think I'd be doing photography again. It just didn't seem important at the time. I was taking care of two dying people and making art seemed pointless.
I recently mentioned that I sold my telephoto lens and a follower messaged me about their zoom lens that had been sitting on a shelf collecting dust for quite some time. They asked if I could make good use of it.
So, I have been devising a plan on how to do some bird photography while I am still stuck in bed recovering.
My mom bought this really cool bird bath that is very on theme for me.
I set it up outside my window. I decided to fill it up with bird chow rather than water. And over the past week I have been figuring out a workflow to photograph birds from bed.
My camera has a wireless radio trigger that also sets off the flash. And I can activate the trigger from anywhere in the house. I have my security camera watching the bowl of seeds and it sets off a motion alarm whenever a bird stops by.
I did some exposure tests with Baby Yoda. It seems the lens was a little more telephoto than I thought.
But I figured birds are small and they would be in frame.
Maybe I'll zoom out a little just to be safe.
I soon got my first customer.
A female cardinal stopped by.
Do you see her?
Okay, so my first attempt didn't quite go according to plan.
But look at how sharp that lens is!
I'm sure I will iron out the kinks.
I've been doing this 5 minutes at a time for days. I've been a little frustrated with how little energy I have to work on this project. But the hardest bits are solved.
Now I just need more birds to show up.
I'm hoping they will start to gossip with each other about how I am trying to spread my seed.
I've made some progress. My setup still needs tweaking, but the birds are starting to arrive. A lot of them have been camera shy, hanging out just out of frame.
But I inched the camera a little to the right and that helped.
She looked a little mad that I caught her in the middle of eating.
And then a mourning dove stopped by.
That name is a bit of a bummer, so I'm going to refer to its more festive moniker.
This turtle dove was all "check out my booty."
That's a nice bird booty, but I don't think getting 22 of these for Christmas is a good gift.
When you are just starting out learning about crafting visuals, the "rule of thirds" is given to folks as training wheels. If you don't know what you are doing, it is a good way to force people to think about their framing and avoid obvious snapshot compositions.
The idea is that if you gain experience and get better, you will shed those rule-of-thirds training wheels and start thinking more deeply about composition.
Eventually, you learn that central compositions can be done well and may gravitate back to them. Professionals use central framing all the time and some use it almost exclusively. You can play with focus and symmetry and layered compositions. It's a great way to draw the eye with leading lines. The idea is that you put the subject in a central position and then the secondary subject and the periphal context support the subject.
This movie was not made for TikTok or vertical viewing. That Twitter user overlayed the vertical video lines to demonstrate their point, and it ended up proving them wildly incorrect.
Remember that composition, more than anything else, needs to serve the story.
Let's look at how this falls apart.
How does this composition work without the other kids gossiping about her? This composition was constructed to show she is a school pariah. If it were on TIkTok, she'd just be walking down a hall.
Here we might not even know these are legs.
Here you can't tell she's hiding in a bathroom stall. Never has a roll of toilet paper been so important to a composition.
Have some random fingers, TikTok.
The subject is actually the glowing hands. This is a symmetrical composition, not a central one. Her in the mirror is not actually the subject.
I'm pretty sure that floating mouse needs to be in frame. TikTok gets an eyeball and a thumb to figure out what is going on.
You get one leg to figure this one out. Good luck.
I did find one single scene where the entire context could be shoved into a vertical video format.
That is the only shot that would work on TikTok out of the entire trailer.
What most people call composition is actually just subject framing. Which can be an important part of the composition, but it is only one variable.
I'm going to steal from another post of mine because I don't feel like writing essentially the same thing over. But I detailed how a professional visual author thinks about composition beyond just framing and rule of thirds...
Things that are often considered when designing a shot… background, midground, foreground. Symmetry or asymmetry. Primary and secondary subjects. Visual weight and balance. Visual anchors. Subject separation via depth of field, background/foreground exposure ratio, contrast, or color palette. And most importantly… storytelling.
Let's think through the composition of this shot.
I prefer to think back to front. What do I want the viewer to see?
Background is the sky. Midground is the town. Foreground is Michael B Jordan.
They chose a mostly symmetrical composition, with the gun being asymmetrical to help it stand out. The visual weight of the left is balanced on the right. Symmetry is a powerful and dramatic visual anchor. If you would rather the viewer chew on the environment and absorb the entire frame, you may frame the subject off-center.
The primary subject is his face and the secondary subject is the gun. You can tell this because the gun is out of focus. They want you to visually anchor your attention to his expression. The angle of the gun even has a leading line that goes straight to his eyes.
Subject separation is mostly done with an exposure ratio. He is dark against a bright white sky. There is some background blur as well.
The camera is slightly below his eyeline, so it is looking up at him. This gives him a sense of power and control. He is dangerous and imposing. They are using a strong central framing with a low perspective as storytelling tools.
All of those creative decisions are part of composition. If all you consider is subject framing, your shot is probably going to be weaker for it.
I agree that there is some content being made more friendly for watching on phones. But even with shows and movies, most people still make the effort to turn their phone sideways. So I don't think this central framing thesis holds any water. I think it was just a compositional preference by the filmmakers.
Either that or Wes Anderson was a visionary, creating the most TikTok-able movies before the platform even existed.
Armchair internet critics keep trying to diagnose bad movie visuals. They keep trying to isolate individual variables as the cause, rather than a larger systemic issue of risk-averse, efficient filmmaking—where artists have limited creative control and unreasonable resource limitations.
So far, the villains have been soft lighting, background blur (shallow DOF), CGI, digital cameras, and now we can add central compositions to the pile.
But if you look at the best looking movies throughout history, many filmmakers used all of those things, in abundance, to great effect.
It's a matter of ratio, intensity, taste, and effort.
Knowing when to use hard vs soft light.
Knowing how to use soft light while keeping the image dimensional and not flat.
Knowing how much to blur the background to get good subject separation.
Mixing practical with CGI to give the effects grounding and real world lighting reference.
Making sure your central subject framing is well designed and having the taste to know you can't just stick something in the middle and get a good shot without all the other compositional variables considered.
If I could assign bad visuals to one villain, it would be low effort.
If you use soft lighting because it is easier to make look good than hard lighting, that is a low effort issue, not a soft lighting one.
If you blur the background to mush because you didn't want to put in the effort to create an interesting set or go to a beautiful location, that is low effort, not shallow depth of field.
But often, low effort visuals are the only option available. Filmmakers are given a day to shoot and not enough time and money to prepare. They are told to just use a green screen. They are told to light things flat so they can just fix it in post and easily blend the VFX.
The high effort options are not always available to every director. They are just a cog in a capitalist studio machine that demands efficiency over artistry.
So when these critics blame the artists for not knowing their craft rather than blaming the systems they have to work within, it makes me very frustrated.
And if we take away all of these vital tools to create visuals, it will not make things look better. You just get low effort hard light, deep depth of field of boring backgrounds, bad practical effects, all with everything framed on a rule of thirds grid line.
But hey, at least it is shot on film!
Which, by its nature, is a high effort medium that vastly inflates the budget. So corners will have to be cut for every other aspect in order to support that choice, causing even more low-effort compromises.
The Fox Family has created a secondary den underneath my deck. So I set up some hidden cameras to capture their nocturnal activities. I didn't realize I was going to record a nature documentary.
Mama Mia is a very good huntress. She captured 3 mystery animals and a whole-ass raccoon. Which she brings to the kiddos waiting under the deck and they take the kill back to the main den.
They don't seem very appreciative. It seems Marian, McCloud, and Michael J are spoiled brats. Not even a "Thanks for the dead raccoon, Mom."
Teenagers, amirite?
I have no idea where Papa Milo was. He's the biggest and I don't think I saw him all night.
So a few days ago I noticed a fox friend running through my yard. I was able to snap this photo.
I called him Milo.
I thought he was a lone wolf who chose my neighborhood as his domain.
But Milo is not alone.
Milo is a papa.
He and his lady fox have three little foxes!
I went from never having seen a fox to FIVE foxes playing in my backyard.
The three kiddos were wrestling. Their opening move is to do this cat-like superjump and then dive bomb into their sibling. Then they roll around. And then a high speed chase ensues.
One of the little foxes came near the house and I got a few closer photos.
I love the little black socks.
I'm going to need to figure out a lot more fox names.
Scrolling the timeline on Mother's Day can be hard for me so last year I decided to turn my grief into something positive.
This year, I decided to make it a tradition.
I noticed people were posting a lot of old, degraded photos of their parents. So I try to pick a few good candidates to restore.
I spent a couple of years learning how to do this. I am very good at it. And I really enjoy it. But I learned it isn't very lucrative and most people are fine with what AI can do now.
It makes me a bit sad, but I actually think restoring people's precious memories is not the worst use of AI. Plus, I use several AI tools in my workflow. When there is extensive damage, generative fill is a lifesaver. The remove tool makes quick work of stubborn accumulated dust. And AI upscaling makes the photos printable, often at many times their original size.
My restorations are still much better than the free AI ones. I edit them with a precision and fidelity that can hold up to 400% magnification. I take special care to preserve likenesses and often work with reference photos to make sure people's loved ones still look like who they are after upscaling. I also do colorizing by hand (though I will sometimes make initial color maps with AI). I color grade using film stock color references so the photos still look like film, and I add texture and grain selectively to keep people from looking like smooth rubber.
But that kind of quality takes so much time. One photo is probably several hundred dollars of labor. And no one is willing to pay that so I have to charge below minimum wage.
I will probably just do pro bono restorations from here on out. Focus on fixing photos that AI isn't very good at restoring. Plus I have a ton of family photos that I want to restore for my niece. At some point, years from now, she'll be old enough to talk to me without my brother's permission. And she'll probably want to know who her grandparents were. I hope to be ready with photos and stories by that time.
In any case, it felt nice to do this on a hard day. And it helped clarify to myself how I should use this skill I've developed going forward.
Ok but do you or do you know anyone who does commissions for this kind of thing? I’ve been really missing my great grandmother recently and I’d love to have a few photos of her restored a bit and although I don’t know when that would be in my budget I’d love to know where to go once I’ve got funds
I'm not opposed to doing commissions, but due to health reasons I am being a bit selective about what I take on. If the job is too complex, it might be months before I can tackle it. If you need it sooner, I can recommend a different restorationist who I feel will do a good job.
If anyone wants a free assessment, just send in example images of what you want restored and I can advise you from there.
Scrolling the timeline on Mother's Day can be hard for me so last year I decided to turn my grief into something positive.
This year, I decided to make it a tradition.
I noticed people were posting a lot of old, degraded photos of their parents. So I try to pick a few good candidates to restore.
I spent a couple of years learning how to do this. I am very good at it. And I really enjoy it. But I learned it isn't very lucrative and most people are fine with what AI can do now.
It makes me a bit sad, but I actually think restoring people's precious memories is not the worst use of AI. Plus, I use several AI tools in my workflow. When there is extensive damage, generative fill is a lifesaver. The remove tool makes quick work of stubborn accumulated dust. And AI upscaling makes the photos printable, often at many times their original size.
My restorations are still much better than the free AI ones. I edit them with a precision and fidelity that can hold up to 400% magnification. I take special care to preserve likenesses and often work with reference photos to make sure people's loved ones still look like who they are after upscaling. I also do colorizing by hand (though I will sometimes make initial color maps with AI). I color grade using film stock color references so the photos still look like film, and I add texture and grain selectively to keep people from looking like smooth rubber.
But that kind of quality takes so much time. One photo is probably several hundred dollars of labor. And no one is willing to pay that so I have to charge below minimum wage.
I will probably just do pro bono restorations from here on out. Focus on fixing photos that AI isn't very good at restoring. Plus I have a ton of family photos that I want to restore for my niece. At some point, years from now, she'll be old enough to talk to me without my brother's permission. And she'll probably want to know who her grandparents were. I hope to be ready with photos and stories by that time.
In any case, it felt nice to do this on a hard day. And it helped clarify to myself how I should use this skill I've developed going forward.
Some of the most difficult restorations I've done...
I've had to deal with intense color casts before, but never a green one. Thankfully, the original color was still in the data, but figuring out how to filter out the bad green and keep the good green required a lot of problem-solving.
The original was actually in really good shape and had a lot of detail. But there were just so many people in the photo and they all needed individual exposure correction on their faces. And I colored everything manually. I think this ended up being over 400 layers by the end.
For this one, the car was completely blown out and had no data. But I posted it in a bunch of vintage car forums and was able to identify the make and model. I replaced the blown out car with a better photo of the exact same model from the same year. Then I researched what paint color options were available and matched that as well.
This is one where folks might assume I used AI, but aside from my upscaling tool, I actually did this with traditional compositing techniques. It is probably one of the most damaged photos I've been able to save.
Her facial likeness was completely destroyed.
However, I restored this other photo of her.
And I was able to use it as a reference to restore her likeness in the lake photo.
It doesn't hold up as well as I'd like at this magnification, but considering how damaged it was, I am pretty happy with the result. And I think I was able to make it look like her again.
One might think photo restoration is only about saving really old photos, but I have fixed modern wedding photos that were taken in bad light and I regularly use these skills to fix smartphone photos.
My phone is getting old and is in bad shape. The back fell off and I keep it together with a case. And the lenses are unprotected and hard to clean. So all of my photos look a bit hazy now. But sometimes it is all I have to capture a moment. So I take photos and hope my editing magic can fix them.
I took this out my front window on a foggy morning.
I actually got a court summons for having that chair in my front yard.
It's a long story.
And I just had a visit from a foxy friend the other day.
My neighbor says he sees this fella all the time. So I feel like he needs a name. Otis's favorite toy was a stuffed red fox, so I'm thinking maybe I'll call him Milo.
I am going through a very long and difficult health recovery. And I have this heart thing that makes me very weak if I exert myself too much. I was trying to take this old red chair to the end of my driveway for trash pickup, but my heart started beating way too fast, and I only dragged it halfway.
So I just left the chair in my yard.
It rained soon after and I realized this pleather chair was waterproof. It shrugged off the rain and was perfectly fine. I then sat in the chair and it was a comfortable place to sit outside and relax.
So I left the chair where it was.
I can't leave the house much, so I have to find photographic opportunities close by. I eventually started incorporating the chair into my photography.
This thing was nigh invulnerable. No season was able to damage it.
And I did a fun Halloween bit with it.
It was in my yard for over a year, bothering no one.
But then I got a warning letter in the mail. The county inspector claimed I had "rubbish" in my yard and I had to remove it. I'm suspicious that a neighbor tattled on me.
I am making a lot of progress with my health. But I am at a stage where I have to get worse to get better. So I am currently bed bound most days. I have very few good days where I could move a big red chair.
It took me a few weeks, but as soon as I had a good day, I dragged the chair back into my garage and out of sight.
But it was not soon enough.
The inspector referred me to the court and I got a summons for not complying.
So now I have to appear before a judge and explain why I had a chair in my front yard.
I'm hoping they will accommodate my disability and let me do it over a zoom call. This all feels like a silly waste of time. I have neighbors with old cars on their lawn. I keep my lawn maintained and others let it grow two feet high.
But I got dinged for having a comfy chair in my yard.
Scrolling the timeline on Mother's Day can be hard for me so last year I decided to turn my grief into something positive.
This year, I decided to make it a tradition.
I noticed people were posting a lot of old, degraded photos of their parents. So I try to pick a few good candidates to restore.
I spent a couple of years learning how to do this. I am very good at it. And I really enjoy it. But I learned it isn't very lucrative and most people are fine with what AI can do now.
It makes me a bit sad, but I actually think restoring people's precious memories is not the worst use of AI. Plus, I use several AI tools in my workflow. When there is extensive damage, generative fill is a lifesaver. The remove tool makes quick work of stubborn accumulated dust. And AI upscaling makes the photos printable, often at many times their original size.
My restorations are still much better than the free AI ones. I edit them with a precision and fidelity that can hold up to 400% magnification. I take special care to preserve likenesses and often work with reference photos to make sure people's loved ones still look like who they are after upscaling. I also do colorizing by hand (though I will sometimes make initial color maps with AI). I color grade using film stock color references so the photos still look like film, and I add texture and grain selectively to keep people from looking like smooth rubber.
But that kind of quality takes so much time. One photo is probably several hundred dollars of labor. And no one is willing to pay that so I have to charge below minimum wage.
I will probably just do pro bono restorations from here on out. Focus on fixing photos that AI isn't very good at restoring. Plus I have a ton of family photos that I want to restore for my niece. At some point, years from now, she'll be old enough to talk to me without my brother's permission. And she'll probably want to know who her grandparents were. I hope to be ready with photos and stories by that time.
In any case, it felt nice to do this on a hard day. And it helped clarify to myself how I should use this skill I've developed going forward.
Some of the most difficult restorations I've done...
I've had to deal with intense color casts before, but never a green one. Thankfully, the original color was still in the data, but figuring out how to filter out the bad green and keep the good green required a lot of problem-solving.
The original was actually in really good shape and had a lot of detail. But there were just so many people in the photo and they all needed individual exposure correction on their faces. And I colored everything manually. I think this ended up being over 400 layers by the end.
For this one, the car was completely blown out and had no data. But I posted it in a bunch of vintage car forums and was able to identify the make and model. I replaced the blown out car with a better photo of the exact same model from the same year. Then I researched what paint color options were available and matched that as well.
This is one where folks might assume I used AI, but aside from my upscaling tool, I actually did this with traditional compositing techniques. It is probably one of the most damaged photos I've been able to save.
Her facial likeness was completely destroyed.
However, I restored this other photo of her.
And I was able to use it as a reference to restore her likeness in the lake photo.
It doesn't hold up as well as I'd like at this magnification, but considering how damaged it was, I am pretty happy with the result. And I think I was able to make it look like her again.
One might think photo restoration is only about saving really old photos, but I have fixed modern wedding photos that were taken in bad light and I regularly use these skills to fix smartphone photos.
My phone is getting old and is in bad shape. The back fell off and I keep it together with a case. And the lenses are unprotected and hard to clean. So all of my photos look a bit hazy now. But sometimes it is all I have to capture a moment. So I take photos and hope my editing magic can fix them.
I took this out my front window on a foggy morning.
I actually got a court summons for having that chair in my front yard.
It's a long story.
And I just had a visit from a foxy friend the other day.
My neighbor says he sees this fella all the time. So I feel like he needs a name. Otis's favorite toy was a stuffed red fox, so I'm thinking maybe I'll call him Milo.
It's time for the color indigo to get "Pluto'd" from the rainbow.
ROY-G-BIV.
You were taught it in grade school. You accepted it. You didn't really understand what indigo was, but it was an easy mnemonic and Crayola was nice enough to create a crayon for it.
But then they realized it was just blue and they gave up on it.
Isaac Newton was one of the first people to figure out the visible spectrum. He was trying to differentiate colors. He had 6 candidates. But he had a religious obsession with the number 7, so he decided there would be blue and also blue but called something else.
When you look at an actual prism, the blue end of the rainbow gets a little murky.
You may notice it sort of ends at blue, but that could just be the angle of the light or the camera had trouble capturing it. Spectral violet is not easy to represent on screens. Almost all LEDs are unable to emit in the violet range. In fact, you may not have seen true violet indoors for years and not enough people seem upset about that. We're just accepting purple as a substitute. Purple is like Kool-Aid and violet is grape juice.
Sorry, I digress.
But to the human eye, when viewing an IRL spectrum, violet is pretty distinct. It's often a little easier to spot than blue in actual rainbows.
Indigo, not so much.
In fact, there is a much more distinct color visible that got completely left out of the rainbow. Do you see it next the green band?
Cyan!
When you look at a spectrum chart organized by wavelengths cyan stands out much more than indigo.
Indigo... needs to indi-GO.
It's time.
I propose we give it a proper sendoff, though.
We will find a team of the world's best painters, send them to Pluto, and have them cover every inch of the not-quite-a-planet with indigo.
You may ask, why wouldn't we just teach astronauts to paint?
Because it will annoy Ben Affleck.
Indigo will be referred to as a dwarf color.
Pluto and indigo will be merged into Plutigo.
And they will commiserate together in the cosmos in their demoted states.
One problem yet to solve... creating a new mnemonic.
ROY-G-CBV just won't do.
The Committee to Demote Indigo will be entertaining suggestions in the replies. I look forward to your creativity.
One thing I should clarify, I don't want to banish indigo as a color.
This is a pedagogy issue.
The visual spectrum is technically infinite. But infinity is a difficult concept to teach to children. So we introduce them to the rainbow. And we try to separate the spectral bands to help them understand a few of the more distinct colors.
The problem is... teaching indigo as part of the rainbow is a bit like this...
It's a tiny sliver between blue and violet and it leaves out the much broader and more distinct cyan band.
I did a little more research, and it seems Newton was trying to match up the spectrum to the Dorian musical scale. He thought light and sound were connected and had a lot of superstition about cosmic numerology and the harmony of seven. He originally divided colors into red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. To get to seven "notes" of color he added orange and split cyan and blue into blue and indigo.
Cyan was represented, but the meaning of color names drifted over time. So his blue was cyan and his indigo was blue.
Which I think strengthens my case that indigo, as a rainbow teaching tool, needs to go live with Pluto.
