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.

Buying a DSLR camera can quickly become very expensive, especially with the latest increasingly advanced technologies. There is no magical formula to pay less, but several proven tips can help reduce the cost without sacrificing essential quality.

Buy a Less Expensive Camera Without Sacrificing the Essentials

Opting for an older or lower-range model often saves several hundred euros. For example, models like the Canon EOS 250D or Nikon D7500 remain more than adequate for beginners and those progressing in photography. These cameras offer good handling, performant APS-C sensors, and advanced features like Dual Pixel autofocus—but at much more affordable prices than the latest releases.

eBay and Buying Used: A Gold Mine

The secondhand market is the primary source of savings. Platforms like eBay are full of DSLR cameras in very good condition for a fraction of the new price. However, it is important to be cautious: choose reliable sellers, verify the condition of the gear, check the shutter count, and ask for detailed photos before purchasing. Good knowledge of the equipment requested minimizes risks and allows for great deals.

Waiting for the Next Model Release, But Not Too Long

DSLR prices often drop when the next model is released. It may be wise to wait for the next generation before buying. However, one should not postpone buying indefinitely, risking missing the most advantageous period and occasional promotions. Knowing when to buy is key to getting your DSLR at half price.

Track Prices on Amazon

A very useful tool for not missing the best deals on Amazon.fr is camelcamelcamel.com. This free service allows you to track the price history of cameras and get alerts when a DSLR reaches an attractive price. This helps avoid impulsive purchases and ensures buying at the best market price.

Going to Japan: A Good Deal if You’re Ready

Japan is known for offering some of the lowest prices worldwide on camera gear, especially DSLRs. This is due to a very dynamic market and intense retailer competition. However, you must be prepared to pay in cash, even for large sums, which is not always easy. Also, you should know customs rules well to avoid surprises upon return to Europe. This option is especially interesting for enthusiasts willing to travel and handle these constraints.

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

David DuChemin

Wild dogs of Zambia.

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.

Today, subscriptions are everywhere. You must pay by the month. But if you stop, you lose all your tool setup at the end of the month. Nothing is left, nothing is yours.

So, I prefer tools I can buy, that will serve me for years. If the service/cost ratio is good, I’m OK with purchasing a competent tool, but I don’t want to keep my wallet open at all times.

FastStone Image Viewer

The very first step in any processing is sorting. You need to move fast, you need to find the best images, sometimes in a batch of 10 (fast bursts are lethal for the number of images).

FastStone Image Viewer is a marvel in this respect: inexpensive, very competent in display and – above all – it offers a critical feature for sorting: it can display images 4 by 4 on the same screen for quick comparison. For example, you can zoom in on all four images in parallel with a flick of the mouse wheel and compare the quality of detail in the pre-selected images. Use the “Del” key to eliminate unnecessary images, and the “*” key to mark images for priority retention.

Since the software is free for amateur users, it’s even better. But a $35 lifetime license is still an attractive price to support the ongoing development of this indispensable tool.

DxO PhotoLab

Visualizing and sorting images is not enough. You also need to be able to work on them to fine-tune the rendering. FasStone Image Viewer has some interesting correction capabilities, but while this is sometimes sufficient, I can’t rely on it and need a powerful image processing tool (including RAW).

Photoshop has long been considered the benchmark. But the other tools on the market have really come into line. Today, there are only two reasons to choose:

• The user interface must be simple and effective
• Noise processing must enable you to gain ISOs to work in the best shooting conditions.

Adobe does this very well, but so do others. In particular, I warmly recommend DxO PhotoLab (not to be confused with DxO PureRAW plugin for Photoshop or Lightroom). The quality of RAW processing is exemplary. When it comes to noise reduction, it’s often the case that DxO does better than Adobe.

I therefore recommend two options:

1. Either you’re addicted to Adobe and need to add DxO PureRAW to maintain your usual workflow with incredible image quality.
2. Or you’ve discovered (with the trial version) that DxO PhotoLab is a perfectly fluid development environment that’s at least as comfortable as Adobe’s. DxO PhotoLab is French, and for €229, the software is yours for life. Upgrades only cost €109, but are not mandatory if you haven’t changed your camera (my main reason for upgrading).

I can’t get enough of DxO PhotoLab, and version 7 (yes, I know, version 8 is already out) is simply incredible in the detail it extracts from my RAW files.

A word of warning though: you need computing power. On PCs, a graphics card less than 3 years old is highly recommended to drive the processing engine.

IrfanView

This tool is a bit of a “tool bag” for my quicker DIY projects. For example, it’s very fast for image viewing. But it’s also remarkably easy to use for cropping or resizing an image without having to bring out the heavy artillery.

What’s more, IrfanView recognizes just about any image format (photo or not), which makes life easier for quick format conversion.

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.

This is clearly one of the nicest big cats that you can find. A large leopard (or panther) with a thick fur and a wide face hosting two blue eyes. This is a dream to photograph. But most people only know such snow leopards from the animals in zoos.

For example, in France, there is a nice specimen in Paris Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle (in the Ménagerie) where I shot the photo illustrating this article. There are some nice specimens in the Woodland Park Zoo of Seattle.

The very first thing to remember is that the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) is an endangered species in the Red list of the IUCN. This means that they are quite rare: In 2003 the worldwide population (see table above) has been evaluated between 4000 and 6500 individuals. This is probably below the limit to allow long term survival of the species, considering that this Asian Panther is found in an enormous area from Mongolia to India or Nepal.

The distribution is quite uneven, of course, but in most places the animal is quite difficult to find. This makes photo safaris a sort of random hunt for the animal. Furthermore, in many cases, it asks for a lot of walking, usually in high altitude and mountainous treks (Tajikistan valleys have little in common with Swiss Alps).

In all cases, the photographer should need to be able to walk for several hours, the snow leopard may be quite elusive (a specialist I met in Nepal a few years ago expected no photograph from such a photo trip; and some scientists spent months before seeing their first snow leopard in the wild).

That being said, it appears that some locations have become much more attractive for photographers since significant efforts have been applied to create a sustainable push for cohabitation between the leopard and the local population. That has allowed creation of a small economy around the tourists that come, attracted by the snow predator. Several locations in Ladak, India or in Nepal, or in Mongolia have developed significant programs where herders get some cashback in case of predation on their animals, reducing the risk of killing-at-first-sight of the emblematic animal. These have been associated with the training of local guides and the creation of the needed supportive economy (transportation, lodging, restauration, etc.) which ensures that the local people started regarding the snow leopard as a source of revenue rather than a major threat to their livelihood.

For example, I found two of these photo tours/safaris from very serious organizations (This is not a mere walk in a National Park, and it is important to include such a photo trek in a wider support for the protection of the endangered snow leopard).

• Snow Leopard Trust: Hemis, India trek for Snow Leopard
• Wildlife Photo Tours: Snow leopard in Kibber, India
• Pamir (India): Snow leopard in High Pamir
• NatHab: Snow Leopard quest
• Discover Altai: Leopard photo in Mongolia
• Wild Images: In search of the grey ghost of the Mountains (in Ladakh, India)
• Wild Images: Snow Leopards & Wildlife of Mongolia tour (In several locations of Mongolia)
• Annette Mossbacher: Photo Tour To Photograph The Elusive Snow Leopards in the Indian Himalayas
• [FR] Un oeil sur la Nature : voyage photo au Ladakh (Inde)
• [FR] Vialala : safari phot en Ladakh
• [FR] EcoSafaris : vallée de Spiti (Inde)
• [FR] Tamera : observation en Ladakh (sans doute moins photo que les autres)
• [FR] Etendues Sauvages : voyage d’observation
• [FR] Objectif Nature : Vallée de Kibber (et voyages sur mesure)

Nevertheless, if all planets align (Mother Nature is not always sympathetic with our requirements), you’ll bring not only pictures of mountain species (blue sheep or owls and eagles) but some images from one of the most elusive and most handsome big cat, the snow leopard.

See also

• Snow leopards on Flikr
• Wikipedia: Snow Leopard

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

• Canon EOS RP Advanced User Guide (English)
• Canon EOS R Advanced User Guide (English)
• Canon EOS RP Guide d’utilisation avancée (Français)
• Canon EOS R Guide d’utilisation avancée (Français)
• Canon EOS RP Guía para usuarios avanzados (pdf) (Español)
• Canon EOS R Guía para usuarios avanzados (pdf) (Español)

With these, you should no longer hesitate if you did not know whether one of these cameras was the right one for you.

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).

We all know about wildlife photography. Most of us have seen nice pictures taken of hummingbirds (their colors are often impressive and changing with light). Most photographers will try and make good images of a flying hummingbird (not easy with these little speed demons!). But did you notice how pretty their feather are?

Why not try and do macro-photography of the plumage of these birds always in movement and whose wings flap 50 times per second? It would be nice picture, wouldn’t it? It can’t be too hard, right? Right? Oo maybe it’s a bit difficult…

I won’t forget that hummingbirds are only present in the Americas (Sorry! none in Europe, Africa or Asia) and mostly hiding in the tropical forests (though you may find them in cities and up to Canada).

For my own first successful trials, I worked from hummingbird refuges in Ecuador forests. It’s always easier when your models are present in large numbers.

Also, Ecuador has the advantage of hosting many locations where the hummingbirds are not too afraid of human presence.

Also notice that in most Ecuador locations, hummingbirds are not too easily afraid of human beings. They would not leave the place for hours when you appear. This is important because the photographer will introduce a significant perturbation as you will see.

The general rule is that we want to bring the bird to the camera, not the opposite (it would be useless trying to run after a hummingbird to try and stick your lens in its face). So, we will use a location the bird loves to go to and set our “photo trap” up, before waiting for the model to jump into the camera field.

All hummingbirds need to feed nearly continuously and they prefer very high energy drinks, flower nectar or the next best thing: Sugar water delivered in feeders installed by their human friends in a garden.

One of the big hurdles is ensure that the bird is staying right where you need it to be. I would never try this with a branch or a flower. But you can use a feeder. Just be sure to choose one where the bird can easily stand while drinking (like on the left) and not one where the bird will need to hover in front of the drinking holes (like on the right).

In the second case, the bird may appear stationary at first. But it really keeps moving slightly, making your focusing ever so slightly more difficult. And you don’t need this additional trouble!

If you observe hummingbirds, you will notice that when they will stop at a feeder to drink, there are a limited number of “feeding holes” (you can temporarily limit this with tape) and this means a limited number of preset positions for the bird.

Setup your camera and macro lens (or even better, your long focal lens attached in front of a macro extender) on a robust tripod. Pre-focus where the head of the bird will appear when it lands on the feeder. Then wait.

Several things will quickly appear critical at this juncture. Let’s go through them.

• Hummingbirds are attracted to red and orange colors. Avoid wearing these colors. It may confuse them, or distract them.
• Your movements must ALWAYS be very slow. You are so big and so near! The aim is to look like a rock, not a huge predator.
• Your tripod head must be set to allow minor side movements: You want to be able to reframe easily, and you cannot move a hand, just a slight push on the camera.
• Here, a pendular head (Wimberley-type) becomes a real asset.
• Whatever happens, don’t move for at least ten minutes. The hummingbirds must get used to your presence.

From this point, you will (merely) have to do with the “usual” difficulties of macrophotography (mostly a lack of depth of field – you will need to wait for the sun shining on the feeder ; don’t move the feeder, let the sun come to the feeder).

Then, you should be able to produce some interesting photos showing the marvelous details of the minuscule feathers of the small hummingbirds.

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

So, we decided to change the web site (this is actually an underground and near-invisible activity, I have to admit) to remove Google Analytics and start using a solution fuly integrated into the web site itself (with possibly private data being stored exclusively in France). Now, we use the Matomo open-source solution.

In the coming weeks, the web pages mentionning the use of Google Analytics will also be manually updated to reflect this change.

There should be no impact on your daily navigation here. But, feel free to inform us if you observe some incident possibly related to this change.

• The Art of Waves: A Lifetime of Awe-Inspiring Surf Photographs talks about the book of Clark Little which demonstrates that you can shoot photos of waves during 15 years: The Art of Waves. And he is interested in the wave itself, and what is below.
• Photographing Waves: One of The Most Rewarding Subjects is another PetaPixel post wirtten by Rachael Talibart. There she describes her passion and how she invites us to dive into wave photography.

Maybe, this will push you into photographing some waves during the Summer vacations.

One of its endangered sub-specie is the Iberian lynx, whose name reminds you that it comes from Spain and Portugal only. Protected and quite shy, it is not always easy to catch pictures of the Iberian lynx (the photographer should better be quiet and patient). There is a photo gallery on Wild Focus (Iberian lynx page) where I assembled a small portfolio of this cute cat.

However, both of them did a great job of showing them in ways that make them shine.

Warren Keelan

You should visit his website, Instagram, Facebook, 500px, and Twitter.

Even better, you can buy the 2020 calendar edited by Warren from some of his best pictures. A good way to keep looking at these photographs all eyar long.

Rachael Talibart

Growing in Southeast England, Rachael spent quite some time in her father’s boat. Apparently, she did not find the experience very pleasant and she did not grow into a great sailor, but into a great photographer, both fascinated and inspired by the waves of a furious sea.

Several major storms gave her the opportunity to go and shoot waves in violent conditions, leading to superb images that most people would not know how to create in most cases. Her website is full of gorgeous such pictures.

• User manual of the Canon EOS 90D in English
• Manuel utilisateur du Canon EOS 90D en français
• Le maximum avec le 90D (Amazon)
• Canon EOS 90D: Guía para usuarios avanzados (pdf)

Now, you are ready to purchase the newest and brightest Canon APS-C DSLR, the replacement of the Canon EOS 80D and the Canon EOS 7D Mk II. Go and shoot pictures!

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. Petapixel’s A Field Test of the $12,400 Nikon 180-400mm f/4 TC1.4
2. And the even better Shooting polar bears with the $12,000 Nikon 180-400mm F4E TC1.4 FL ED VR

Such a beast of lens is not for everybody, but you can’t beat reading real-world testing.