A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Dian Arbus

Less is always more.

Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

Don McCullin

When ready to press the shutter button, I try always to ask myself if this image is producing an emotion in me.

Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past..

David DuChemin

Photography is a language more universal than words.

Minor White

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

Ansel Adams

The digital sensor does not change this.

A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.

Charlie Waite

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

Ansel Adams

Be the creator, be the actor.

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies

Dian Arbus

Take pictures and memories, but do not leave any garbage behind.

But it is quite possible to have nice images if you accept the accumulated requirements of a technique ignored by most: multiflash. Even better, for fast-moving subjects, the flash is the only way to stop the movement; Nevertheless, you’d want to render this more elegant, more discrete and ensure that it renders the subject to its best.

Example in hand: Hummingbirds. Impossible to stop wings when they beat between 20 and 80 times per second. Even 1/8000s is squarely insufficient if it does not catch the wing immobile either in high or low position. But, while a big fat flash shot solves the problem once and for all, you get a picture with a splash of white light, and shadows drawn from the light’s axis. Solution: several flashes (hence the name: multiflash).

As a matter of factn using several flashes is not simple, as any studio photographer will tell you. But you will quickly discover that it is all a matter of handling the balance of several items that I could (too?) quickly summarize with:

• Provide lighting source similar to natural light
• Avoid ugly shadows with additional sources
• Provide a setting that enhances the subject

These are three axis I want to follow here. It will not make you an expert. But it may give you some leads to experiment in a more ordered way, if you want to identify the best parameters quicker.

Preliminary conditions

One critical requirement when setting up this technique is often not obvious: Ambient light. It’s too easy to forget that outdoors light is in competition with your flash lighting setup. So, you must start from a relative dark ambiance. To the point that it would feel insufficient for photograph (without a flash).

So, even in the wild, you must set everything up in the shadows. A roof, an awning, a dense tree above, a forest. All is good, since we will want to work with relatively low flash power (often 1/32 power, or even lower). So, te ambient light must be too dark for photo. If not, you risk mixing both lights and getting some kind of ugly “double exposure” in one shot (sometimes confused with a lack of focus).

When shooting at hummingbirds, feeders will be set in darker places, under a tree, or even in the forest shadow.

Natural light

The first objective will always be to try and get a setup which can be considered more natural (or relatively natural). Main light sources must always come from above (the sun shines from above).

Avoid big light from under the subject. The picture would feel weirdly unbalanced.

Soften the shadows

But since a flash will often produce a very harsh light, it is recommended to compensate this with secondary softer light sources to lighten the main shadows (more or less below and opposite to the main flash source).

You may be tempted to avoid adding flashes and use reflectors or soft source like studio umbrellas. The biggest issue is that even a single (usually) black flash is already perturbating animals/birds behavior. Opening a white reflector of 1 meter diameter (or more) and studio umbrellas will probably ensure that you never see your model again in you improvised studio in the wild. Not counting the difficulty of installing up large gear in natural settings. At the strict minimum, you will need to schedule some time for the animals getting used to the presence of your equipment before starting a photo op.

Enhance the subject

This starts with the background. Several options are available to you.

1. Natural background: Ensure that you have one or several (powerful enough) flash(es) to light the background plants. This may be be tremendously hard if they are far behind. Check and check again to ensure that the appearance is nice and clean.
2. Printed/drawn background: If the natural background is too far, too messy or not nice enough, you can try attaching a printed background. In case of hummingbirds, the size is not an issue. I would not try this for an elephant (!).
   What to draw? everything is possible but don’t overdo it. Less is often better. Less details, less artificial colors, less artificial shapes.
3. Black or dark background: If the background is far behind, not lit, or in low light, you will get a very dark background for your model. The is a very good choice to enhance the colors of the hummingbird feathers.

Setting up the camera and flashes

Finally, let’s setup the camera itself.

1. Compulsory manual mode.
2. ISO 400
3. Speed: synchro-X or 1/200 (These are the basic flash settings!)
4. Aperture: The flash will freeze the model; In order to favor details you will close the aperture too. Start with f/16.
   But, really, it is possible or necessary to vary aperture (and ISO) lightly to ensure the perfect exposure (don’t fiddle with speed, it won’t influence in flash photo).

Your flashes will be set between 1/16 power and 1/128 power, in order to allow fast recharge cycles (a short 3-to-4 picture burst must not be interrupted by flashes recharging between actions).

The balance between the various flash lights is a combination of distance to the subject (it reduces light quantity) and flash power setting. 1/16 for a firm light. 1/64 for the shadows. Combined with distance.

The camera flash (see above) is the Master to control the others (set as Slaves). Generally, you need to use the Wireless mode of the flashes. But it could be even simpler if your flashes can merely shoot when they “see” the main flash light. The easiest setting indeed.

There is a very good paper from Nate Chappell (Multi-flash Hummingbird Photography) that could help understand this specific point. Nate is not only a photographer with a long-researched technique, but he is sharing it with people in his photo-tour company where he is leading bird photo workshops (mostly on the American continents). You will notice that he is using the Nikon SB-26 because they are rugged, powerful, not too expensive, and easy to configure for synchronization with all flashes on the market (including on-camera ones).

This post is certainly too short to explain it all. There is still a lot of space to experiment by yourself (and I recommend this). But I hope it will help you start the journey to multiflash photography of hummingbirds (not in Europe) or of tits (much more common in France) or any other wildlife.

The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.

Anne Geddes

Wild Focus

This is the web site of my portfolios. There, you will see the subjects I really fell in love with and some more personal projects (often still a work in progress, like my half-portraits).

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The subject before the gear.

The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong.

Susan Meiselas

No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

Robert Adams

You need both.

Sometimes, I am somewhat dissatisfied with the size of my digital photographs. The simplest way to improve (after the fact) is to run any Photoshop-like program, and apply a resampling (resize) preferably with the Lanczos method, in order to get 2x or 3x or 4x more pixels. It is fast and efficient, but it usually generates a slightly blurry but bigger picture. If the target is a large format print that could be watched from a short distance, or for something like printing on a very large canvas, I should have more details in the picture (more than what was initially collected by the camera). The image is still too small.

The other approach would be to use a software tool like Topaz Photo AI or the all-new Adobe Photoshop “Image Enhancer AI”. Those are Pro tools (“Pro” means “expensive”): Topaz costs 199$, its competition often relies on monthly subscriptions. For a normal guy (who only needs it a few times per year, at most), this is not applicable.

Why not look toward (free) Open Source tools? Fortunately, some are existing.

And I added another constraint: I want it to run on my own PC (no cloud resources and/or cloud subscription like what StableDiffusion requires).

The general idea

For a few months, I have been impressed by the multitude of Artificial Intelligence solutions (Didn’t you hear about something named ChatGPT?) and not only to generate human-readable text. Tools like StableDiffusion, Dall-E, or Midjourney generate spectacular pictures from a textual description (a prompt). But they often include a mechanism to extend their text-to-image activity to a much larger scale (usually they produce small pictures to sparingly use computer resources).

My solution – in details

I won’t detail the steps taken to reach that solution. But here it is.

One strong PC, with two options/directions that could be imagined.

• A powerful graphic/video card (not always, but often based on nVidia GPU).
• A super-powerful PC with (most critical) a lot of memory.

In my own case, I chose:

• i9-13900K (with a good AiO liquid cooler, because this beast can heat up quite quickly when running 100%),
• 64 gigabytes of DDR4-DRAM memory (you will hear that this is the limiting factor for the image size).

But, you could work with a smaller CPU (with a lot of patience), or a Mac computer.

Nobody would claim this is a cheap PC, but it definitely works reasonably well.

EasyDiffusion installation steps

EasyDiffusion is a free version of a tool very similar to StableDiffusion. You may install it on your PC, and it will run either on the CPU or on the video card.

• Download the installation program from the EasyDiffusion home page (according to your needs, you’ll choose the binary for Windows, Linux, or Mac).
• Follow the installation steps from the page, don’t worry about changing any option right now. You will need some patience (it goes and download additional models and other packages, it will build some of the files during the installation).
• Run the program from the Windows “Start” menu. This will open a Command window to run a few background things (no need to even look at this), then a browser window giving access to the EasyDiffusion user interface.

• For the first configuration, I would recommend clicking at the top of the page on “Settings” and selecting the following program settings:
  • Auto-save Images: YES
  • Save Location: select the appropriate directory to save your creations.
  • Open browser on startup: YES
  • GPU memory usage: High (with 64 GB of DRAM, you want to use it all or as much as possible).
  • Use CPU (not GPU): YES
  • Beta channel: NO.

Create a text file whose name should be YR_MoreResolutions.plugin.js with the following text contents:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Ski-SDUI-MoreResolutions
// @version      0.1-YR
// @description  More Resolution Options
// @author       Super.Skirv, JeLuF, YR
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {

	options="";
	for(i=6; i<=32; i++) {
		options += '<option value="' + (64*i) + '">' + (64*i) + '</option>';
	}
    options += '<option value="' + 3072 + '">' + 3072 + '</option>';
    options += '<option value="' + 4096 + '">' + 4096 + '</option>';
    options += '<option value="' + 4640 + '">' + 4640 + '</option>';
    options += '<option value="' + 6960 + '">' + 6960 + '</option>';
    options += '<option value="' + 8192 + '">' + 8192 + '</option>';
    document.getElementById('width').innerHTML = options;
    document.getElementById('height').innerHTML = options;

})();

• Install the plugin, by copying the YR_MoreResolutions.plugin.js file in the C:\EasyDiffusion\plugins\ui directory.

Operation and typical use

When arriving at the EasyDiffusion page in your browser, you will need to feed it with a source picture to enlarge and the right upscaling options:

• Choose the source image with the “Browse” button.
• Custom VAE: None
• Image size: 3072 (width) by 2048 (height) – for 64 gigabytes of DRAM.
  • This parameter is dictated by:
    • The need to work on an image as large as possible
    • The memory size limitation. If you have only 16 gigabytes of DRAM memory, you will need to reduce these parameters each in a ratio of 2: 1536 by 1024. But you can explore the optimum for your configuration.
  • Swap the parameters if the image is in portrait (vertical) orientation.
• Inference steps: 50 (this has practically no influence, you can leave the default value)
• Prompt strength: 0 (This is the critical value: It will ensure that EasyDiffusion AI never tries generating a new artificial image from the prompt text, but concentrates on the upscaling job).
• Output format: choose the right file format for you.
• Show a live preview: NO
• Scale up by 4x with RealESRGAN_x4plus (Avoid RealESRGAN_4xplus_anime_6B which is totally not for photography)
• The prompt (at the top of the page), and the Seed value (in “image settings”) are not used, except when naming the output file.

If you don’t have enough memory, you can always reduce the “Image size” or you get a message like the following:

The message tells you what memory size it tried to allocate/reserve. This will guide you when reducing the “Image size”.

If you are correctly configured, after a few minutes, you will see the result like in:

Notice: the new resolution is now 12288 x 8192 pixels (we left from 6960 x 4640 pixels, to reach no less than 100 mega-pixels). But, above all, the Artificial Intelligence (of the ESRGAN network) determined new pixels not only interpolated but imagined as complementary to the existing ones and totally credible.

In the picture used for this example, don’t spend time checking the blurred background. But take a look at the fine details in the structure of the dragonfly wings. It may not be perfect (from the professional entomologist’s point of view, there are anatomy errors), but the ribs/veins and the light reflections are very natural-looking, even in areas where they are only half-drawn or half-blurred. The same remark applied to the eyes and antennas of the dragonfly.

On the opposite, don’t even believe the proposal from the software: It’s no use clicking the button to upscale again to 20032 x 13376; You already reached the maximum size allowed by the available memory. You can’t go further with only 64 GB.

If you want to check the results, I made the files available:

• Original
• Upscaled x4

There are many of them, but I looked at one of the most famous ones:
The Dogwood 52 Week Photography Challenge.

Major advantage: It does not concentrate on the technical side of photographic but extends to all ways to improve the resulting image. A good way to bring me out of my confort zone. Maybe to improve my work within the three main directions of the challenge:

• Story telling
• Composition
• Inspiration

If you want to know, my own 2019 results will be published on Roumazeilles.net (in the #Dogwood2019 category). I’ll try and comment about the experience at the end of 2019 (If I succeed at keep the impetus).

1. A Privacy Policy.
2. When you submit a comment on the site, it is now explicit (through a checkbox) that you understand that this will imply our storing of some of your personal data, and that you consent to it.(« explicit » and « positive » consent).
3. Creation of a Data Protection Officer (that’s me!) in charge of answering questions and requests of modificaiton and removal of your personal data if you ultimately want to revoke your consent.

the objective is to make more explicit and fully compliant, the choices that we already made to respect our visitors, and their privacy. Like we do since the beginning.

wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to recognize them? Yes, of course. The simpler solution? Put a different name on each drive, each memory card, each USB thumb drive, but this is very small step. We know that graphical interfaces work better. Why not replace all these ugly grey icons with something ore meaningful (and more pleasant)?

A simple process

The only requirements are:

• Access to Google image search (but you can use another one, of course)
• Use of a simple image editor able to save to “Windows .ICO” file format – I use IrfanView which is very feature-rich, but simple to use and perfectly free (as in free beer).

Step-by-step process:

1. Define an image which is representing the drive well,
2. Collect this picture,
3. Set it to the right format,
4. Set it up on the USB drive.

Step by step

Define the image for your icon

I recommend several possible and complementary approaches. Keep in mind that the objective is to easily recognize the USB thumb drives or the disk drives connected to the computer USB port(s). Nota bene: This works with internal hard drives too.

Solution #1: If the USB thumb drive is very recognizable, you can find on the web some good photo representing it nice and well. You can even collect a press release photo form the manufacturer if you have the manufacturer name and the product model. For example, I can look for photos of external hard drives from Western Digital, MyPassport model, red color. Google result is offering a wide choice of good pictures:

It works very well with memory cards. Plenty of good pictures from Sandisk, Lexus, and other manufacturers.

Even if you don’t have the exact name of the thumb drive (not all of Chinese-sourced drives are named properly), it is quite easy to look for a good description like “orange USB drive”. Less precise, somewhat more error-prone, but it works astonishingly well.

Solution #2: With the same Google Image Search, look for a nice photo that would represent the disk contents (or its name). Try looking for “photography” or “black and white photography” or even the name of a famous photographer (I tried with “Man Ray”, “Helmut Newton” who have very symbolic images to offer) for a hard drive to hold your photo archives.

Choice reduction

In front of so many options, I recommend intelligently reducing choice with some specific search filters. (on the Google page, press the “Tools” button and choose the following filters):

1. Only take large size images (you’ll see it is important)
2. Select public domain pictures that you can modify: “Labeled for re-use with modification” (Why steal a photo? What good photographer would steal the photo of another one? Use a freely available one).
3. Most critical: Chose a very simple, pretty but easily recognizable picture (an icon may be very small).
4. Last recommendation: It is often better to start from an image with a white or very lightly colored background (it “works” better in most cases, as you will see).

Collect the picture

Download the image from Google.

Create the icon

After all, an icon is merely a square image brought down to a small size and in special ICO format. the walkthrough is rather simple, you’ll see.

Load the image into the IrfanView application.

Modify the size of the picture to move to a square ratio (change canvas size). You can do it by either enlarging or reducing the canvas size (choosing the right background color).

The result should be a nice square picture but you may feel that it is rather large for an icon.

As a matter of fact, size does not matter much here. The larger, the better to keep the icon looking good when changing display sizes. Now comes the time to make sure that the size is exactly a multiple of 2 (eg. 2048×2048 pixels). It is not useful to go further than 4096×4096 pixels, but do not go below 1024×1024 pixels. IrfanView will do this easily, from Image>Resize/resample... menu.

Then, you need to save the picture as .ICO file (be sure to use “Save as type” with the “ICO – Windows icon” option).

Setup on the USB drive

This icon (this ICO file) must be saved at the root of the USB thumb drive (in the  D:\ directory), preferably under the autorun.ico name (but we can accommodate any other name like Lynx.ico).

Last, copy or create a text file named autorun.inf with the following contents (also in D:\ directory), :

[autorun]
ICON="autorun.ico"


This small file will allow Windows finding the icon named autorun.ico (or any other name that you previously chose)).

One comment about memory cards: You can do the same for your SD or CF Flash memory cards. Just remember that this will disappear any time you format the card in the camera. Have a copy handy to put it back on the Flash card.

Result

After that, your icons will be perfectly distinguishable. Only empty slots are exhibiting the default ugly non-images. All the rest is animal pictures, photographs from major artisits (Doisneau and Man Ray), pictures of the thumb drive actually used, etc.

Bonus: This is applicable to your company logo (see the example above). If you give USB thumb drives away, better than putting any photo, install your company logo for a fully personalized thumb drive! If you are a wedding photographer selling digital photos on a USB thumb drive, this is a minor improvement to have the drive look more professional than ever.

So, many photographers are wondering what to do in order to keep protecting ther images. I have a few more ideas to share with you now (usually coming from some other web sites) in light of these recent events:

• CrashPlan itself offers their customers to move to Carbonite, another solution from (previously) competitor and whose reputation is not usurped.
• Obviously, CrashPlan also offers to move to a professionnal and more expensive offer. I did not try but I am afraid that performance may not be there (what was acceptable at CrashPlan for Home price may become less attractive in the future).
• ArsTechnica recommande chaudement BackBlaze (et leurs arguments semblent tout à fait sensés, même si je n’ai pas pratiqué).
• Personally, I propose (on my other Roumazeilles.net web site) to explore a more complete and more extensive solution base don a NAS server from Synology at home and a cloud hosting from Amazon Cloud Drive: Synology-based synchronization solution

I hope it will help you.
It may be a long reading.

Tomorrow, March 31st has officially become the “World Backup Day” thanks to the efforts of a few people behind a web site of the same name.

So, let this post fade on the screen and go backup your data and photos. Now!

A few complementary recommended links:

• Workflow and backup for photo-video
• All about photographer’s backups

1. Always format the memory card in-camera (formatting on a computer may not be right for your camera, same thing about formatting on another camera)
2. Always wait 3 seconds before ejecting the memroy card (or check the red LED flashing on the camera body and wait until it defintely stops blinking)
3. Copy/backup the contents as soon as possible (a portable hard drive is the best option; Do not wait for time in front of your portable PC), then immediately re-format the card (on the camera!)
4. Never apply image selection in-camera (judging image quality is nearly impossible on the camera LCD; Always edit on your PC/Mac)
5. Personal routine: Store empty and exposed cards in separate bags (different sleeves in the backpack, different colors/texture for different card cases or bags)

Go and check it at https://thepanoawards.com/2016-winners-gallery/ to appreciate it all. And, maybe, you’ll get some inspiration for your own future shots…

Now, YLovePhoto helps you and can be transparently accessed through both addresses:

https://www.YLovePhoto.com/

http://www.YLovePhoto.com/

For most people, this will change nothing. For those who prefer to keep some of their browsing (a little more) discreet, it may help.

Useful reading: HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I’ll store there sets of links that I find on the web. I’ll try to make them appear in groups linked by an obvious common subject in the coming months (If I’m good enough at it and if you are interested enough).

I’ll start with a series (videos and posts) about depth of field, a topic central for any photographer.

Tell me what you think of it. I can’t wait to know.

Here is a delightfully intelligent solution to it: Make the packaging double as a user manual (or re-use the materials of the manual into a clever packaging for the DSLR camera).

Please check all the details on PetaPixel: This DSLR Box Design Doubles as the Owner’s Manual.

When Adobe launched this kind of solution and when they made it compulsory in order to obtain the most recent version of their tools, some people warned that this was a major blow into the capacity to maintain a reliable capacity to work on our photos. Most either ignored the warning, downplayed its importance or or did not understand the full breadth of the risk. Today, the reality check is here; And it’s hurting real bad with thousands of professionnals waiting for the service to come back while trying to explain to their customers that nothing can be done until Adobe finds a solution (
I sympathize sincerely).

Of course, this suspended animation state is bad in itself (nobody missed that). But this is highlighting the issues at hand that were less obvious or more difficult to understand.

1. Unique/single failure point: If/when Adobe fails, we have no other option than wait. We are used to having a computer fail or a software stopping to work and -usually- it’s only (!) a matter of moving the DVD to a new PC, switching over to another workstation or another professional. Now, all Adobe customers fail in the same minute. This is a systemic risk like we are afraid of in the global bank system. No fall back option.
2. Opacity: The fact that Adobe Creative Cloud is far outside the scope of its users (except maybe some global-level customers who may have a direct line with Adobe management) makes it nearly impossible to have visibility. And in this kind of situation, we, the users, want/need to know immediately a/ what is happening, b/ what we can do to mitigate the situation (even if nothing is possible), c/ how/when the solution will be available. [And today, Adobe communication is an exemple… of what should not be done]

Is ease of subscription worht it? Is the flexibility of having always the latest release version at your hand worth it? This is anybody’s choice and the choice cannot be done for you. But, since we have some time on our hands (if your customers are not shooting on the phone right now), it’s time to think about our choices.

Sony does not go into great details, but says that they are working on a correction for the issue (I would not like to be one of the engineers tasked with this). In the mean time, the owners would better be using soemthing to mask this part of the camera: gaffer tape, a large elastic rubber band, or elastic hair ties (as shown on BTC).

If Canon Imaging is still growing thanks to a strongly depreciated Yen (given by Mr. Abe), the total number of shipped parts is dropping (-21% from 2013). And the compact cameras are going through the floor (-28%). Interchangeable Lens Digital Cameras are a fuzzy category (including DSLR and others), but the results are relatively good with (only) a 7% loss in shipped quantities.

Based upon this, it’s no surprise that Canon may be re-considering the importance of staying in the entry market where the competition comes from Chinese-designed and -produced cameras at bargain basement prices and from smartphones as expensive as many cameras but available at all time in our pockets. There was no such official information, but it’s heard through the grapevine that the decision may laready have been taken to move out of the entry-level point-and-shoot cameras to concentrate on more high-end products.

What do I think about it? It would make sense and it would be very consistent with the overall marketing strategy of the big brands (starting with Canon, Nikon and Sony) which are trying to elevate the performance of their products (bigger, more expensive, more pro DSLR; sometimes, going all out for the retro-fashion like with the Nikon Df; bigger sensors with the Full Frame sensors on every camera including the smallest ones). One possibility would still be for Canon to sub-contract these difficult entry-level products to Chinese designers with only a Canon label on top of them (to keep a fake market presence).

this is bad news for 600 employees. This is also the probable end of an astounding range of flashes and camera accessories, from mid- to high-end. We thought that they were strictly unassailable and, once again, the economic reality caught a solid brand. Not even the older manufacturers are immune from the fierce competiton.

Let’s hope that they will find a way to save a significant part of their activity and re-build something out of the ashes.