Photography

I love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.

And what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.

In psychology, there is a model of learning called the four stages of competence. In my last two decades of amateur photography, I’ve seen myself travel through all four of these stages. All the while, my opinion on gear has evolved.

Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as an art outside the codes of language or culture, an art uniquely in touch with the experience of loss.

ImageQuilts allows you to make "quilts" from images on your computer or anywhere on the web.

One of the interesting aspects of photography is the way it loosens our instinct to draw distinctions between the permanent and the temporary. In these enduringly fixed compositions, the detail of a mark scratched into the surface of a wall carries no greater weight of reality than the frozen swirl of light on plaster or the calligraphic-like shadows of chair backs cast across a floor.

Months ago, I was pondering ways to improve my photoessays. My posts had focused almost purely on the photos and the stories. I felt that describing the gear used would be an improvement since gear is a small but integral factor.

I was considering listing out cameras and lenses at the end of each post. That’s when I remembered my previous drawings of cameras. I decided an illustration with a legend would be a welcome addition.

• we’re beginning to visualise the previously invisible deep structure of text
• comparatively
• in real-time
• and then we’re learning how to manipulate text based on these hidden features.

I’m reminded of that famous series of photographs, The Horse in Motion, from 1878.

Until that moment, neither scientists nor the public knew whether or not all four of a horse’s hooves came off the ground when it runs. Imagine! It was a controversy!

The camera was a new instrument that showed what was already present, but inaccessible to the human eye.

But the camera isn’t just a scientific instrument like the, I don’t know, Large Hadron Collider. By the Saturday Evening Post, here are 5 Unintended Consequences of Photography (2022):

Photography Decided Elections
Photography Created Compassion
Photography Liberated Art
Photography Shaped How Americans Look
Photography Gave Us an Appreciation of Time

So the camera doesn’t just observe and record, it changes us.

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Text is becoming something new, that’s what I mean.

We’re inventing the camera and Photoshop simultaneously, and all their cultural repercussions, and to begin with this means new apps with new user interfaces, and where it goes after that I have no idea.

...a mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs.

Koya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.

We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.

A book about a decade of walking. It's where I’ve tried to distill why it is that I walk so much: Walking as a way to become who I wanted to become but didn’t know how to. Walking as a way to reflect on where it is that we come from. And walking as a way to bear witness to a certain grace visible only when you’re bored out of your skull, when you’ve been walking for weeks on end, and when you think you should just pack it up and go home. There, at that point of exhaustion, appears a little thing — a hello, the smallest gesture, something that becomes, yes, almost supernatural, spiritual in a way that is impossible to recognize amid the average day-to-day routine. Something you can only see in that elevated rhythm of the walk.

This is a book of those moments.

Pictures have always been a meaningful part of the human experience. From the first cave drawings, to sketches and paintings, to modern photography, we’ve mastered the art of recording what we see.

Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results.

I was thinking about this not long ago while reading in Petapixel an essay by a photographer named Scott Reither, “Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit A Scene.” In it, he described photographing one particular stretch of beach, over and over, throughout his career.

Of course that landscape has changed over time, and of course he’s had moments when he felt he’d captured the same territory so many times there was nothing left to see.

But there was always something more to see — maybe because of a change in Reither’s life, rather than in the physical environment.

Critical Minerals – Geography of Energy is a multi-chapter project that explores the profound transformation in the global energy landscape – the shift towards renewable energy sources. The story delves into the intricate geopolitical, social, and environmental implications of the exponential demand for minerals necessary to achieve renewable energy goals.

...The project currently has four chapters, each focusing on a different critical mineral. It consists of four, possibly five chapters, each dedicated to a specific critical mineral: copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and we are planning to include a fifth chapter on rare earth elements.

Photographic survey of the Barbican Estate, London, starting with the pillars.
Shot on a Mamiya RZ Pro II using a 6x6 film back.

I learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.

The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.

Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.

Why is it that so much of what is commonly called AI “art” is kitsch? 

In part this is because users of AI image generators fancy themselves as artists even though few of them have any art training. This is common in photography. Wealthy individuals purchase camera gear based on reviews claiming that some camera or lens has greater technical abilities to reproduce reality faithfully and then apply complicated methods to assure that their photographs demonstrate technical proficiency. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is the leading example of this. Popular with amateurs with no aesthetic training, HDR is an attempt to capture a scene in which the range of luminance exceeds the dynamic range of the camera sensor, and often even the human eye itself. The results typically have too much detail in the shadows, dark skies, unnatural colors, the hyperrealistic effect of an acid trip. 

These sorts of photographers, along with individuals who produce digital illustrations for consumption on platforms like Artstation and DeviantArt, 3D printing enthusiasts, makers, indie musicians working with samplers and synthesizers, vloggers creating content for YouTube, gamers streaming on Twitch and YouTube, and fashion enthusiasts showcasing their work on social media are “prosumers,” a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book The Third Wave. Toffler’s “prosumer” merges the roles of producer and consumer, suggesting a shift in the economy and society. In this model, individuals are not only consumers of products and services but also take on an active role in their production. This concept was revolutionary at the time, predicting the rise of customization, personalization, and participatory culture facilitated by technological advancements, particularly in digital technology and the Internet.

At the same time, prosumers largely create kitsch, characterized by an appeal to popular tastes and a frequently derivative nature. Kitsch thrives in environments where production is geared towards mass appeal and immediate consumption rather than nuanced artistic merit or innovation. For traditional modernist critics, such as Clement Greenberg, kitsch represented the antithesis of genuine culture and the avant-garde. Kitsch, Greenberg explained in his seminal 1939 essay “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” is produced by industrialization, designed to satisfy the tastes of the least discerning audience without intellectual or emotional challenges. Greenberg associated kitsch with the replication of traditional art forms and aesthetics, but emptied of genuine meaning or complexity, offering immediate gratification rather than enduring value or depth.

The Project 100 Vending Machines From Japan is an explorative photo series documenting my first visit to Japan in mid-2024. It showcases the unique vending machines I found throughout my trip, featuring locations such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Uji.

Japan 2024
Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka

Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?

Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.

As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.

Komorebi is a Japanese word that means sunlight filtering through the foliage. It’s much more than a technical description, it’s a feeling. It’s the emotions you experience from the shimmering light and dancing shadows created by the swaying of leaves in the wind. You often find komorebi under the canopy of a forest, especially in the early morning or late evening “golden hour” light.

...As I watched Perfect Days, I found myself relating to Hirayama, the main character. He is drawn to that komorebi feeling of the light coming through the trees, and tries to photographically capture it. I oftentimes do that, although not usually with a lot of success. I don’t believe I realized that it’s a certain emotional response that I attempted to capture in those moments, or especially how difficult it is to communicate that feeling photographically. That’s the job of the photographer; however, it’s not an easy job, at least not for me. It’s one thing to capture the scene as I see it, but another to capture it as I feel it. Hopefully, the more I practice and the more I learn the better at it I will become. Photography is a life-long pursuit.

The PENTAX 17 is a half-frame camera, capturing two 17mm x 24mm pictures within in a single 35mm-format (36mm x 24mm) film frame. It produces vertical-format pictures with similar ratios to those captured by smartphones, and with the distinctive image quality created only by a film camera.

The half-dozen photographers I spoke to about the X100 all marvelled at the authenticity of the Fujifilm simulations compared with other forms of digital manipulation.

...[But] the emulation of film isn’t the camera’s only appeal. For many people, iPhone cameras are part and parcel of a broader digital addiction. They are forever at hand, which is convenient but also anxiety-inducing; the same device that lets us document our experiences serves us breaking-news alerts and work pings from the office, in addition to beckoning us to turn our photos into content. By designing a modernized camera that is simply a camera, with a fixed-length lens that can’t be swapped out, Fujifilm tapped into a desire for a more restricted kind of picture-making.

Paragraphica is a context-to-image camera that uses location data and artificial intelligence to visualize a "photo" of a specific place and moment. The camera exists both as a physical prototype and a virtual camera that you can try.

The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced that many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking—basically the human reality of perception—that photography couldn't convey, and that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them.

1. When publishing an article on the web, avoid padding it with unnecessary words.
2. A picture is worth 1000 words.

Therefore, the best editing you can do is to remove a picture (especially if it’s stock photography or AI slop).

By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible.

What is the Fujifilm shooting experience? Is it the retro styling? The manual knobs and rings? The optical viewfinder on camera series like the X-Pro and X100? What-you-see-is-what-you-get, perhaps? I think yes to all of those, but even more it’s about the feeling in the moment. That’s a very abstract explanation, so let’s see if I can do better.

When I have a Fujifilm camera in my hands with the retro styling, tactile manual controls, perhaps even through an optical viewfinder or maybe via an EVF showing me exactly what the final picture will look like, the moment slows, and it’s just me and my gear for an instant. I feel the sense of possibilities (as Rush put it in the song Camera Eye). It’s not about quickness. It’s not about resolution—it’s not about any specs of any sort. It’s just that instant and how it feels and that’s all.

Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about.

Indeed, the problem is even more complicated than that. For in a very real sense the achievement of these paintings was in their making, and the finished canvas at one level is only an incidental relic, a fossil of that original process of discovery: not only do you have to be present before these paintings in order to experience them, it may be that you have to have made them as well.

Vintage models blended in, new ones stand out.

When photography pioneers used Leicas, the cameras weighed 200-300g—perfect for discreet shooting. Modern Leicas tip the scales at over 700g and cost around $10,000. Hardly inconspicuous under any aspect.

This reminds me of how Apple stopped making the iPhone mini and now sells bulkier, pricier models. Leica's rangefinder cameras have also forgotten their original goals.

...Leicas take beautiful photos, but a heavy status symbol seems at odds with the heritage of street shooting candid shots. Like you don't need a Pro phone to be a professional at anything except doomscrolling, or like Hemingway didn't write his novels with a Mont Blanc, you also don't need a Leica to take great pictures. Especially now, especially for street photography.

That's what many brands now do: they sell you a status symbol, but not the ability to have fun and get better at a craft.

Bloom filters are what's called a probabilistic data structure. Where a Set can give you a concrete "yes" or "no" answer when you call contains, a bloom filter can't. Bloom filters can give definite "no"s, but they can't be certain about "yes."

...if you're happy to accept being wrong 0.0001% of the time (1 in a million), you could use a bloom filter which can store the same data in 3.59MB. That's an 82% reduction in size, and all it costs you is showing the user an incorrect warning 1 in every million links visited. If you wanted to take it even further, and you were happy to accept being wrong 0.1% of the time (1 in 1000), the bloom filter would only be 1.8MB.

First, Generation Z was bringing back the point-and-shoot digital cameras of the early 2000s, but now TikTok users are bringing back the Fujifilm X100 — and dramatically driving up the price of the camera with it.

FujiAddict reports that the prices of Fujifilm X100 cameras have skyrocketed recently, specifically in the past few days, due to TikTok users praising the camera on the social media platform.

Out of all the cameras that Fujifilm has produced during the past 12 years, the X100 series and the X-Pro series are the cameras that have always been my tools of the trade. I’ve seen the two lines grow more complete with every new iteration, to the point where I thought that Fujifilm couldn’t improve upon the X100V. It has been that perfect to me. But then again, so was the S, the T and the F.

...Yet again I need to express my awe of Fujifilm. How did they once again mange to improve upon a camera that I already thought was pure perfection? I really have no good answer to that. Anyway that’s what they did, and that’s where we’re at. An already wonderful do-it-all camera just got made even better.

The X100VI is absolutely fantastic.

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus. Many of the stills were pictures I didn’t remember taking, ones I’d passed over or missed in my melancholic, late-night scrolling. So many were chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues curiously sniffing a lens or bounding out of frame; a lot were objectively bad photos, which I found made them especially funny as iPhone wallpaper.

I've been using the Leica SOFORT 2 for the past couple of months and really enjoying it. Though this won't be a formal review, I actually think that an informal one is more appropriate for this little casual gem of a camera.

Downpour is the best way to make games on your phone. Collage together photos, drawings and text, and then connect them into an interactive story. It's genuinely quick and easy to use — you can make a game before your tea has gone cold.

Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. 

Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It’s been around for 198 years. People seem to like it.

A photograph leaves us with an image, and a recording leaves us with sound. But when it's feelings that we want to preserve, not photographs or audio, then they should not be recorded, but rather truly felt. What we truly feel will remain as memories even if we don't try to record them.

Glass looks and feels perfectly tailored to my photo sharing needs and expectations. For me it’s even better than pre-Facebook Instagram in the sense that it pushes me to select and share what I think are good photos (same as it happens with Flickr), rather than making me obsess with getting ‘the Instagram shot’ at all costs every day or multiple times in a day. It doesn’t cheapen photography like Instagram has done for years. 

That’s why I hope Glass’s founders/developers will resist feature creep. Resist user objections like: I don’t think Glass is offering that much for the subscription price they’re asking. There are a lot of people who will gladly pay for having a cleaner, simpler, focused experience.

I once sent a camera to a client, with a request that she keep a visual diary of her newly completed house. For a number of months she duly sent me one photograph a day, of whatever caught her attention, and it was fascinating seeing the spaces from her point of view.

In part it's simply about amassing the archive, but it's also about understanding the implications of every design decision and bringing this knowledge to bear on new projects. You have to keep pushing the learning process.

STILLGRAM IS AN A.I. TRAVEL CAMERA APP FOR IPHONE® THAT MAGICALLY REMOVES BACKGROUND CROWDS FROM YOUR PHOTOS.

“For that’s the trouble with this picture business,” Chuck added, “there is so little satisfaction in it! You are always beset with the haunting thought that every picture could be improved, if not by you, then by someone, sometime; so you end up traveling in a circle, periodically returning to do a better, or at least a different, interpretation of the subject. Perfection, of course, is the goal.”

As our work matures, the perception of it is less and less understandable through photographs. One can only understand it by being there and moving and staying still. One reason is that we have been trying to integrate our buildings into the landscape. Thus, often the most important space is the empty space that is contained by the built forms. This empty space is the heart of the project at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. It is the invisible magnet that holds together the separate buildings, and provides the coherence that makes the project feel whole. So what is not there is equally important, perhaps more important, than what is there. How does one photograph nothing? One experiences it.

The most powerful camera for iPhone and iPad.

"f/8 and be there" is an expression popularly used by photographers to indicate the importance of taking the opportunity for a picture rather than being too concerned about using the best technique. Often attributed to the noir-style New York City photographer Weegee, it has come to represent a philosophy in which, on occasion, action is more important than reflection.

This is a list of photographs considered the most important in surveys where authoritative sources review the history of the medium not limited by time period, region, genre, topic, or other specific criteria. These images may be referred to as the most important, most iconic, or most influential—but they are all considered key images in the history of photography.

Maria Nordman always insisted, "Nothing should hang on a wall. The walls are reserved for the sun." It was like being inside a large cardboard box that had been gently slit open with an X-Acto knife, allowing thin planes of light to emerge. It is well known that Nordman avoided using the camera to document her installations, feeling that it abstracted and framed various aspects of the experience, which is best absorbed more holistically. It is ironic that Nordman's rooms often took the form of a kind of architectural camera in which slits in walls and corners created mysterious apertures that allowed light to leak into a room at a glacial pace. Being inside one of Nordman's spaces is like being inside a camera operating in exceedingly slow motion.