I make the D.N.P Diffuser because I needed one myself in the field. The story starts well before that, with a fascination for wildlife that never really left me.
Wildlife has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I'd spend hours buried in books about animals, or outside watching a single species until nightfall. That passion faded a little during my teenage years — until it caught up with me again on my first trips, to Réunion Island, then South America, and especially Australia — my childhood dream, where I lived for 2 years.
That's where my interest in photography was born: a way to hold on to what I was living through. What I used to discover in books came alive in front of me. Macro and close-up photography first, then wildlife, then landscape — to me, these disciplines are deeply connected.
I remain an amateur photographer today, by choice: I never wanted to mix work and passion. Professionally, I build FileMaker solutions; the rest of my time, I roam the Hérault region, where I've lived since 2020, looking for whatever it's hiding — and when I travel, I'm just as happy working as a scuba diving instructor, or whatever else circumstances offer. Keeping a certain freedom in what I do is what gives my life meaning.
In macro photography, I almost always need a flash to fill in shadows — especially when natural light runs short. But at that distance, a bare flash on often very reflective subjects creates hotspots: burned-out patches of light and harsh shadows that ruin the shot and the beauty of these creatures.
That's why, in 2018, I started making my own diffusers. My first attempts weren't much to look at. Through trial and error, I landed on a design that really worked for me: quick to mount and remove, compact enough to fit in my bag, tough enough to handle both tropical and desert climates. But its most important quality was versatility — being able to use it with my macro lens as well as a wide-angle, to approach larger subjects like snakes.
Today it's become an activity in its own right: I design and sell these custom-built diffusers under the name D.N.P Diffuser.
At first, I drew and cut every diffuser by hand — slow, tedious, and honestly, the cuts weren't always clean. As orders kept growing, I looked for a way to improve both precision and output.
I got in touch with l'Alternateur, a fablab in Saint-André-de-Sangonis, close to home. Since then, I design every diffuser digitally before laser-cutting it.
“Clean cuts, a huge time saving, a far more finished product — without losing the handmade feel of the final assembly.”
Sometimes I wander without a specific goal, carried along by unexpected encounters — that's probably what settles me the most. Other times, I set out looking for one particular species: I study its ecology, its habitats, recent sightings. Finding a butterfly also means learning to recognise the host plant its caterpillar feeds on, the flower the adult drinks from, the season it flies in — and inevitably, seeing just how much climate change and habitat loss are already disrupting all of that.
My photos try to reveal, with a bit of art, the shapes and details that make up each species. But an image never tells the whole story.
“Context matters as much as the picture itself — an invitation to better know, understand, and maybe help protect, the living world a little.”
The D.N.P Diffuser is that whole approach condensed into one object: gear designed from the point of view of someone who spends their days in the field, not behind a desk.
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