Oliver Holms — Notes

Architecture

The Peace of Wild Things

Oct 25, 2023

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

by Wendell Berry

Week Notes 003 — W/E 23 April 2023

Apr 24, 2023

Work

  • Shot one small commercial job. Finished the edit over the weekend and just dispatched the grade [on Monday]. (I was battling spotlights throughout the shoot — they’re the bane of my photographic life.) I tweaked some of the shortcuts on my Loupedeck CT which really helped me speed up a few common processes.
  • Lots of progress on my new site — though it’s sadly invisible outside of my computer. I’ve created Lightroom folios to mirror the site folios, so that it’s easy to process new images for the site without hunting in my archive for images from individual projects. I’ve recreated the folios from the old site almost exactly to use in the short term. I’m going to refine them once the new site is live. There are so many updates to make that if I wait until I’ve finessed each sequence to ‘perfection’ before launch, it will take months. I’ve learned that it’s better to get things out of the door and then iterate and improve, rather than taking forever to create the canonical output (which is almost always outdated on release). In particular, a website is a garden to tend, not a sculpture that is fixed in its final form. I’ve added a film section too and need to populate it with embeds, thumbnails, and summaries.

Be prolific, not perfect

  • I’ve been posting at least a picture a day to this micro.blog and I’ve enjoyed diving into my archive to find an image that resonates. While I have to turn around most work shoots in 1-5 days, I’ve shot personal images that I haven’t seen since I downloaded them from the SD card. I feel like I’m discovering some of these pictures for the first time. I have a sense that if I continue to shoot more, without looking at the images that I’ve made in the past, I’ll be working blind. If I don’t revisit old work, I’m likely to miss themes and subjects that I’m drawn to subconsciously and won’t be able to strengthen my work by developing these hidden threads further. I want to set aside at least a few hours a week for editing personal work, to tie the pictures I’m making now to the images that came before.

AI

The speed at which AI is improving in different fields really hit me in a visceral way over the last couple of weeks. In photography, there was the first viral AI image mistaken for a photo, Pope in a Puffer; the AI ‘portrait’ that would have won a Sony photography prize if the creator hadn’t revealed its provenance, and the first AI ‘photo’ to fool me in the wild. I tapped on the latter in my Discover feed so that I could check out what seemed to be an excellent doc-style portrait of a young woman in a diner. It took reading the caption to recognise that it wasn’t made with a camera and that the woman and the diner don’t exist.

I’ve understood for a while that AI ‘photography’ would cannibalise the product, ecomm, stock, and maybe fashion spaces. But I thought genres like documentary or street photography, where authenticity is a cornerstone of their appeal, would be safe for a while. Perhaps that’s true philosophically, but soon it’s going to be nearly impossible to tell which bodies of work are real and which are synthetic. The ability to create consistent characters in believable environments is improving week on week.

Regarding music, I’d been predicting to friends that we would see an AI-generated hit within 1–3 years, maybe 5, but now I’m radically revising that down. I heard the pseudo-Drake x The Weeknd track Heart on my Sleeve last week. Not only does it sound like them, it’s also a solid commercial hip-hop track. I’d bet that it would be indistinguishable from tracks from the usual suspects in Spotify’s ‘Made For’ playlist. Instead of my previous ‘hmmm, cool trick’ response to most AI demos, hearing this was a definite oh shit moment.

I’ve known intellectually that AI would overtake all the drudge work, and then eventually all the aspirational occupations, but this is the first time I felt it emotionally. I want to get more hands-on experience with the key tools to gain a tacit understanding of what’s possible. Consuming breathless articles and podcasts about singularities, rapid takeoff scenarios, and the end of work, won’t actually ground me in their real-world applications or the best way to leverage them for their creative possibilities. I think that we’re in for an insane few years…

Food & Drink

Two great and new to me places this week:

  • The Pitted Olive — delicious and hearty Turkish lunch of gozleme and salads for £10 just south of St Pancras
  • Hakata — brilliant ramen joint a hundred meters or so from White Cube Bermondsey. Incredible vegan chocolate and coconut & lime ice cream too…

Recent discoveries added to the Want to Go list:

Art

Saw two shows on Saturday:

  • Af Klint & Mondrian at Tate Modern — I enjoyed this despite not being a huge fan of either artist. As always, it’s interesting to see how skilled many abstract painters are when painting representationally early in their careers. Mondrian in particular had a great eye and hand for rendering subtle lighting effects. I’m a sucker for botanical drawings and really enjoyed the wall of Klint’s intricate sketches of various flowers, grasses, and weeds. Such precision and delicacy. I preferred Mondrian’s work that he was making just before he found his way to the grids and primary colours that he is known for. The palette is softer and the compositions have a little more dynamism and structural looseness. The group of large-scale Klint’s in the final room were a powerful end to the show and included my two favourite pieces of hers. They were so large that the gallery recedes and you feel like you are inhabiting the paintings
  • Marguerite Humeau — meys at White Cube Bermondsey — a large dim room of sculptures that have organic forms, and seem to be made from natural materials, but on closer inspection bear the mark of computer-aided design and production techniques. I loved that the artist considered each sense in order to create an immersive experience. Sounds emanate from deep within some of the sculptures — knocks, clicks, drones — and they blend into an ambient soundscape that envelops the space, and covers the noise of the visitor’s movements. The smell of beeswax creeps up on you as you move past the structures that are made of discs, covered with hexagonal cells, piled up to make a larger form (reminiscent of fungus on the trunk of a tree). Lastly, there were curved seesaws of knobbly wood that you’re invited to lie on. They pose a fun contradiction — the rocking motion is relaxing, but the ridges and mounds on the surface made it impossible to find a comfortable position.

Tools

I’ve been fiddling with Raycast all week. As a long-time Alfred user, it’s been interesting to switch out my app launcher. Alfred still feels snappier, and I prefer its approach to snippets (having a dedicated shortcut to pull them up immediately), but otherwise, I’m really enjoying the change. I like that much of Raycast’s standard functionality e.g. natural language input for calculations and currency conversions, required slightly janky workflows in Alfred. I’m signed up for the Raycast AI beta, so we’ll see how I feel when/if it gives me automation superpowers. I have a lifetime license for Alfred, so there’s no pressure to make a choice yet. I’m going to keep dialling in my Raycast setup and will see what sticks.

I’ve been experimenting with Narrative Select for culling the crap from big shoots. It’s good at ditching the obviously bad pictures, those with funny expressions or blinks for example, but it’s hopeless at pushing good pictures to the fore. Unfortunately, sometimes the best pictures also get pulled into the ‘rejects’ stream if they’re very dynamic — people laughing or moving and so on. It would be great to have help with the initial cull before I finesse the edit and select hero images, particularly while on a tight deadline, but it’s nowhere near ready for prime time. Its best feature has nothing to do with AI — I love how snappy it feels when flicking between pictures. It’s the main reason that I often use it for my first run through the images, before shipping the one stars to (slow and bloated) Lightroom CC. See Craig Mod on Fast Software, the Best Software for a refined take on the pleasures of speed.

Music

Reading

I’m rawing near the end of The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I’m going to do a write-up of my notes once I wrap it. About 40 pages left. I’m still reading The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo too…

Read a couple of good articles over the last few days:

…traditional architecture has always tended to be structurally dishonest. So if this is what makes contemporary traditional architecture pastiche, then most traditional architecture has been pastiche since the faux timbering of the Parthenon. Contemporary traditional architects have most of the great builders of our history as their companions in guilt.

The modernist critic thus has two alternatives: either to concede that neither the modern nor the premodern traditional architect is a pastiche artist, or to claim that both are, and hence that Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque architecture – and potentially many others – should all be condemned as fake. The latter option is consistent but hard to take seriously. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, however important an understanding of structure may be in our appreciation of certain buildings, structural honesty is no more necessary to good architecture than originality is.

# Week Notes 002 — W/E 15 April 2023

Apr 16, 2023
  • On Wednesday I shot installation pictures before an evening event in the cloisters and garden at Westminster Abbey. It was a such a beautiful environment to work in, particularly when the late afternoon light broke through the clouds, slicing through the arches and warming the stone. I loved the feeling of standing on ancient paving slabs, smoothed and rounded by hundreds of years of footsteps. Even amidst the buzz of activity, a sense of peacefulness and quiet suffused the space.
  • The cloisters reminded me of my favourite Serpentine Pavilion: Peter Zumthor’s 2011 black box which concealed a garden at its centre. I love architecture that is open-centred; that wraps around a tranquil, contemplative space. Think Moroccan riads, Mexican courtyards and Zen Gardens. I particularly like courtyards with cloisters. They blur the boundary between inside and outside, creating a transitional space to rest in or pass through.
  • I’ve enjoyed following Jack Cheng’s progress through the Building Beauty course, which centres on the design and architectural principles of Christopher Alexander. In another life I might have been an architect, so it’s been so fun to read about the assignments that he’s been set and how he is working through them (and of course thinking about what I would do in his place!). My favourite so far is A House for Oneself — a project to design your dream house, anchoring the plan to your ‘project jewels’, the five to seven elements of a home that are most important to you. The post covers the whole process from staking out the site, scribbled plans, and on through building models of progressively increasing complexity. I love the approach of working through ideas using models not computers. The crudeness and inaccuracy of working with cardboard is a feature that one can harness to steer their creativity. It encourages experimentation with volumes and areas in search of a harmonious whole, without getting distracted by details and precision. I think that the ideas about balancing different elements, solidifying the relationships between them and enhancing natural centres have a lot of parallels with successful photographic composition and image editing and sequencing.
  • The edit was pretty brutal to turn around, even with a couple of days to do it. Lots of multi-hour straight-through editing and grading sessions. I was pretty square-eyed by the time I finished on Friday evening. Everything seems slower and harder to achieve with a baby, or maybe you are more aware of all the time that you aren’t spending with your new (beloved and sometimes nightmarish) addition, so the time spent on a project has more ‘weight’.
  • lots of baby viewings towards the end of the week and over the weekend. Great reviews from all.
  • ran errands in town on Saturday then walked back through the park. Decided to walk between all of my stops so that I could make use of the beautiful light and shoot some street. As it’s harder to go out for the whole day with baby, I’m trying to use the gaps between errands/appointments or the journeys to and from them, to shoot on the street and keep my eye in. A long time ago I read a (potentially Austin Kleon?) post about building margin into your day and using that time for your personal creative work. The writer gave the example of ordering food and immediately leaving to pick it up so that you can write in your journal or sketch while you wait at the restaurant. Not only do 10mins here and 20 mins there add up, but this approach has the positive side effect of making your life less stressful — you have some padding built in for life’s delays. Since I adopted this approach I’ve gone from being a pathological Latey-Matey to being early or punctual 90% of the time.
  • I’ve enjoyed posting random pictures and thoughts to micro.blog. It feels less precious that posting to my Instagram grid, which has to remain more of a curated professional space. This blog is intended to be looser and more playful — a place to work in public.
  • I keep trying and failing to make time to play around with the headless version of the Dirtywave M8 that I have set up on a Teensy 4.1. I’m looking forward to seeing how the tracker workflow fits with my brain. Who knows what the results will be, but I am very excited about the prospect of making some music.
  • The big goal this week: not to let work drift into the evenings when the flat is quieter, but instead use that prime time for personal creative projects or reading and unwinding. Likewise, I need to carve out some time for exercise and longer meditations as I’ve been letting both slide and they keep me happy and functional.

Music

Lots of great music this week:

Watched

  • You People — so bad that I can’t link to it in good conscience.
  • BEEF — one episode in — not sure how I feel about it yet. It feels like it could pick up steam, but at the moment I’m a little ambivalent.

Reading

  • The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
  • The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo