“Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it’s possible to walk like Alice through the looking-glass, and find another world with the camera —Tony Ray-Jones

Bonus link: lovely B&W pics of Brits by the seaside by Ray-Jones

A Broad Church

Paulie B’s Walkie Talkie series is one of my favourite aspects of photography YouTube. I loved two of his most recent episodes — for passion both subjects have for photography, but also because, set against each other they show what a gloriously broad church (street) photography is.

Laura Fuchs is a pulsing beacon of pure joy who radiates throughout every interaction she has on the streets of NYC. Her mission is seemingly to meet everyone and anyone, blast them with her megawatt smile and make a portrait of them. Quoting from the comments, she’s “casually walking around giving people their [sic] best profile pictures in their lives for free”. I watched the entire episode with a huge stupid grin on my face, and if it hadn’t been late in the evening, I would have grabbed my camera to go and take pictures. Pure positivity, pure enthusiasm.

Jake Ricker has been walking the Golden Gate Bridge almost every day for four years, photographing the people, cars and views. The video gives an insight into his compulsion to make work about the bridge, and the difficult and beautiful experiences he has had while doing so. It’s a place that often attracts people in extremis, as well as commuters passing through, and working on the bridge as led to him saving a handful of lives as well as photographing car accidents. It’s often uncomfortable viewing — the pictures are incredible, but it’s heartbreaking to hear that he has gone into debt to continue the project and at times you can see how conflicted he is. Evidently there’s a tug of war in his heart and mind about whether the obsession is worth the psychological and financial pain. In a different way to the Laura Fuchs video, it makes me want to make images. Not because of the feeling of sympathetic joy that I get while watching Laura work the streets, but because his intensity is awe-inspiring (literally so: it inspires equal parts fear and respect.) It makes me wonder what I could achieve if I dedicated myself to a project with even a fraction of his ferocity.

The two photographers have very different approaches and personalities, but they’re united by the core demand of street photography — relentless engagement with the world, over an extended period of time.

Eternal Cognitive Locations

I loved Matt Webb’s short post about driving in the dark, listening to the Twin Peaks soundtrack, his wife and child asleep. He talks about night driving as “an eternal cognitive location”, an in-between space, a thinking state.

In Matt’s lovely words:

I think you access something other and special when you escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking, that’s another one.

It does a disservice to this cognitive state to believe that it can be found only with psychedelics or meditation or whatever, whereas there are mundane apertures too, and we do a disservice to alternative cognitive states to choose to name “flow," simply because it relates to productivity, and to leave nameless this mode of becoming diffuse and sensitive, able to sense resonances and new ideas from species memory and from the future, and from there, pluck them, and return home with them.

Driving at night is just one of the situations that act as a gateway into a similar subtle and unbounded creative state for me. I love the feeling of being the only passenger still awake on a night flight, listening to music, perhaps looking out the window at the faint black curve of the edge of the world. Or being awake in the early hours pacing back and forth, lulling the baby in your arms to sleep using a combination of deep breathing and telepathy. Also, working late at my old studio on a Friday or Saturday night, the building empty, the present moment stretched to infinity, nothing beyond the glow of the screen and the warm pool of light from the desk lamp.

It’s a different kind of quiet in the early hours. Being alone, or alone amongst others is a big part of what makes it peaceful, but it’s not lonely. The tranquility embraces you, smudging your edges. Comforted, you’re able to let the tendrils of your thinking radiate outwards. The darkness is essential too — it drapes a blanket of stillness over the rest of the world — as if the only movement in the block universe is happening in the dimly-lit space that surrounds you. You’re outside of spacetime, gestating in womb-time.

Going Critical

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

I’ve had this essay stashed in my to read pile for ages and it was totally worth the wait. It explains the concept of ‘diffusion’ in networks using concision, clarity and interactive demos. Better yet, you can tweak the parameters of the demoes live to get an intuitive grasp of how, for example, transmission rates affects critical thresholds. Reading this and playing with the demos has given me a much better understanding of how memes, infectious disease, knowledge and culture spread through networks. The end of the piece, which focusses on how cities / density are powerful both for positive (scenius, cultural transformation and intellectual breakthroughs) and negative (infectious disease, shitty social phenomena) reasons was particularly interesting. One to read on a desktop, not mobile.

Action Bias or "Do Something"

Back in the day, famed Broadway director Gower Champion was directing a musical. With time pressure mounting, he entered the theatre during a rehearsal and was alarmed to see the cast just standing around on stage. The choreographer was just sitting there, in the second row of the audience, his head in his hands.

The director asked, “What’s going on?”

“I just don’t know what to do next,” the choreographer lamented.

The director blinked. “Well, do something, so we can change it!”

I enjoyed this story from Do Something, So We Can Change It!, Allen Pike’s post about tackling ‘two-way’ decisions proactively. If a decision is reversible, it’s better to make your choice quickly, and refine from there. You can undo a mistake if needed, and if you are quicker to take action, you’ll receive feedback faster. Then you can tweak your approach based on how it performs in the real world, rather than ruminating about various options and their ever-branching outcomes.

As someone who is prone to analysis paralysis, I’m working to cultivate a bias to action. I‘ve chosen better defaults to help make simple decisions quicker, and I’m prioritising starting over theorising, shipping over finessing.

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

—Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

via Austin Kleon

They work as if this were the natural thing to do; they create as if this were the natural thing to do; they give birth to beauty as if this were the natural thing to do. They have entered the way of salvation through unconscious faith. It is a path open to all. And once they have entered this path, the creation of plain, natural beauty becomes a thing of ease, a matter of course. This natural, unforced beauty is the result of a kind of unconscious grace. This grace is a special privilege of craftsmen and leads them to a realm of blessed unawareness. Without consciously thinking whether something is good or bad, creating as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, making things that are plain and simple but marvellous, this is the state of mind in which artisans do their finest work.

—from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi (emphasis mine)

A Fresh Coat of Moss

You should embrace the visceral quality in reading. Read mostly fiction. Read slowly. There is a kind of marinating that happens with very good works, they are always more than their story. The goal is not to digest information, but to layer over your reality with a fresh coat of moss. Your own world becomes colored by these stories, so it is worthwhile to spend time seeking the excellent works from across cultures and history.

You should have a goal, in some sense, to be influenced by the works that you read. All stories influence you, regardless of how they get to you. A person who reads no great stories will be influenced by the few stories he does come across in life, for better or worse — and I think mostly worse.

—Simon Sarris, from Reading Well

Complicated vs Complex

Recently, I heard Arthur C Brooks discuss the difference between complicated and complex problems on an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show and it made me think about how that distinction applies to art.

Complicated problems seem difficult when first encountered, but are easy enough to crunch with enough compute. It might take a while, but if you work through the process from beginning to end, you’ll get the answer.

Complex problems often start with simple questions — who will win this football match and how? — but the correct answer, if it even exists, is unknowable. Too many moving parts. Too many unknowns. Too much randomness.

Of course, complex problems are more interesting and important to contemplate:

• why are we here?
• how can I live a good life?
• who do I want to spend it with?

I think this applies to art too. Art that asks more questions than it answers endures, both in the mind and in the canon.

The complexity inherent in good art shouldn’t be confused for complication. The key is work that is dense with meaning and mystery; not necessarily dense pictorially, musically and linguistically. It can be simple, but not shallow. I’m thinking of artists like Agnes Martin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Basho who draw power from a minimal approach.

I want to make photographs which share the qualities of the work I admire: pictures that get better over time, that contain details missed on first glance, that leave you with a feeling that you can’t shake. I’m seeking complexity.

Loved this from James Hill, via Alan Jacobs:

Eve Arnold, the wonderful Magnum photographer, used to recount a story about walking with Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Magnum office in Paris to have lunch at his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli. During the 15-minute stroll home, as he kept telling her that he was no longer interested in photography, only drawing, he took three rolls of film on his Leica.”

“I was not suited for this world, but I am suited for the world I have created” —La Monte Young

From the first part of Tones Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism Part 1. I discovered this excellent old BBC doc the same way I find lots of gems: daring to go below the fold and reading YouTube comments.

Walking with a Butterfly Net

I love this quote I read in a recent Austin Kleon post — Lewis Hyde explaining why he still takes his butterfly net on walks:

I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk. I don’t know if the same is true for birders with their binoculars or deer hunters with their rifles, but for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions. It produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain. It is a puzzle to me why this is the case, why, that is, I can’t simply learn from walking with the net and then put it away and transfer what I know to walking without it.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the net declares my intention, which is to apprehend what is in front of me. Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand. The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own….

As with the pencil, so with the net: Both declare the possibility of action, and that possibility changes the person holding the tool.

Carrying a camera provokes the same feeling in me. Even if I don’t intend to take pictures, my eye is a little sharper and I look closer at the people and places that I pass. Instead of passively absorbing the visual world as an undifferentiated flow, I start to slice it into potential photographs. The readier the camera is to shoot, the more powerful the effect. If it’s in my bag my attention is duller than if I have the camera in hand, exposure set.

The effect is refined further depending on what camera I am carrying. For walkaround purposes I favour cameras with fixed prime lenses. The focal length of the camera I carry narrows the range of possible pictures I can make, so my attention becomes more attuned to certain subjects and working distances.

Likewise, and as Lewis and Austin mention, reading with a pencil in hand has the same effect for me. I’m reading to identify the information I want, rather than blindly ploughing through. I experience a milder version of this effect when reading digitally with the intention to highlight key passages, but it pales in comparison.

Week Notes 018 — W/E 6 August 2023

• A mostly deskbound week with a few pleasant exceptions.
• I’d left my VAT to the last minute, but turned it around within a day and a half. Having to sort my tax stuff four times a year is a revelation. I used to go through a year’s worth of paper receipts and bank statements in January. The ensuing Hell Week would destroy any new year enthusiasm that I’d been nuturing. Now, almost everything is digital, all business expenses go through one of two cards, and I’ve only got three months of transactions to deal with so it’s a fraction of the hassle.
• A couple of days of post work on two separate projects. Some last minute high res to grade and retouching on a handful of pictures. This year I started to use frequency separation, rather than working on normal layers when retouching, and it’s hugely improved the quality and subtlety of my results. It feels a little clunky at first, but it’s well worth learning if you’re unhappy with your skin work.
• I shot a studio visit with Alice Irwin at the end of the week. Alice works in multiple mediums: from large scale sculptures, to prints and drawings. I photographed her a few years ago as part of a series documenting artists at work. She’s since moved spaces (within the same studio complex) and is now working with screen printing, rather than etching. She wanted some new pictures to show her current space and process, so we spent an afternoon printmaking, shooting, and catching up.
  • We probably spent too much time chatting — a lot of the pictures weren’t usable because Alice is mid word… This is something to watch out for, especially when photographing interesting people. You’re having a great time chatting and snapping, but you need to pause and make sure that you get the pictures that you came for. That said, there’s still a reason to work this way: while you get fewer keepers, the successful pictures have a feeling of relaxed intimacy that I really like. When people aren’t used to being photographed, the experience of being ‘examined’ can make them feel uncomfortable, especially if you aren’t talking or taking pictures. I prefer to shoot and talk liberally, so that the subject gets used to the sound and presence of the camera and it begins to disappear. You get a lot of crap pictures in the process, but you create a relaxed mood that’s hard to find if you’re precious about every frame.
• I revisited Matt Black’s American Geography this week. Recently, I’d thought about selling it, as it didn’t grab me initially, but I wanted to give it another go. It hit much harder this time and is a body of work that I want to spend more time with. There is an unrelenting austerity, bordering on grimness, that is difficult to sit with, but the dignity with which the subjects are treated elevates it beyond poverty porn. Matt depicts the subjects as individuals, not ciphers for poverty, so it doesn’t feel exploitative. And my understanding is that he spent time with them to gain their trust and learn about their stories. There’s a lot of visual variety: stark street photos, environmental portraits and minimalistic, almost abstract landscapes. The dense typologies of cigarette packets, beggars' signs, and plastic forks didn’t work for me initially, but I like how the patterns they form en masse sit with the diary page grids of text. The only thing I still struggle with, beyond the subject matter and bleakness, is the crunchy black and white grade. Sometimes it tips over into a high-contrast B&W style reminiscent of bad street photography on Flickr.
• I noticed two potential problems with my M6 TTL — the rangefinder not quite lining up at infinity and the meter not working. I assumed that a dead battery was causing the latter, but a fresh one didn’t bring it back to life. After some back and forth with a helpful Redditor, I tried cleaning the contacts with a pencil eraser. Success! …well at least for half a day. The meter has crapped out again, and now that I’ve loaded film into the camera to check that everything else is working, I can’t fiddle with it. I’m going to finish my current roll and then see what I can do.
• Six month catch-up with some of the couples from our pre-natal course. Nice to see everyone, especially those that we haven’t been seeing socially in the intervening time. The large skylight in the pub’s dining area was creating a lovely slice of sunlight that cut along the edge of our table, so I started to take pictures. I was extra grateful for thought that the designers of the Ricoh GRIII put into its ergonomics as I was balancing a baby on one hip and shooting with my free hand. I think that these pictures of friends and family are some of the most important that we take. As photographers, we can use our skills to cut through the chaos and clutter to crystallise a moment shared. I sometimes feel that my job contributes nothing of value to the world, and in those existential periods, I find it helpful to focus on a less grand goal: adding a little more beauty to the world and to the lives of people that I love.

Some Links to Things that Made me Happy This Week

• @aleha_84’s pixel art
• notes art — surreal and beautiful sketches made daily in the Apple Notes app.
  • See this short video for a round up of the first year and the artist’s thinking behind the project: 365 – notes art
• Learn Music Theory in 29 minutes by Underdog Electronic Music School — one of the best breakdowns of the basics that I have watched. Oscar is a brilliant teacher who breaks down a complicated subject into easy to understand parts. I’ve been messing around on the piano again after a very long break, so it was great refresher to ideas dimly remembered.
• TN:106 Mura Masa - Tape Notes — I enjoyed hearing Alex Crossan breakdown the concepts and production behind his album, Demon Time. I liked that I key part of his process on this project was to do things because they made him laugh or he thought they were a little stupid. I’m drawn to people who can keep the creative process fun, rather than letting it become heavy or pretentious.
• Yuval Noah Harari: Crisis and tragedy in Israel - Part 1 on Leading. Alaister Campbell and Rory Stewart interview Harari on the pressures on Israeli democracy and ensuing unrest. Harari is incise and passionate as always.
• Commit Mono. Neutral programming typeface. — I have been using this wonderful minimalist typeface to write this post and everything else in Drafts this week. It’s designed for coding, but it’s a joy for writing and editing too. I love its simplicity and legibility. The website is a masterclass in design clarity too. It’s been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 license, so it can be used freely for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Enjoy.
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Navigating Finder — sometimes it’s about finessing the basics… I was looking for a shortcut to do something specific but instead stumbled on this great breakdown featuring a host of shortcuts that I didn’t know. I’ve committed a bunch of them to memory but there were three stand outs for me:
  • using shift + cmd + G to activate Finder’s ‘Go’ command bar — you can search for any folder and hit enter to go direct. (I also use Alfred with custom parameters that target specific file types, so that I can search only folders or Lightroom catalogues)
  • moving files without using the mouse (or the command line): select the files you want to move -> hit cmd+ C to Copy them -> navigate to the desired destination (perhaps using the above tip) -> opt + cmd + V to move them, rather than paste them to the new location. I’ve been using this all the time since I found about about it.
  • hit shift + cmd + ? to open the Help menu, start to type the sort order you want, select it and hit enter, and get your view arranged correctly in seconds. This shortcut works in most apps, and is a great way to quickly access an action that doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut.
• Tony Hawk: Harnessing Passion, Drive & Persistence for Lifelong Success - Huberman Lab — self-recommending
• Aphex Twin - Windowlicker mini-doc — great video essay running through Richard David James’s musical development on the way to Windowlicker. I’ve always listened to bits and pieces of Aphex’s output, but I’ve never made the time to dig into it as a body of work. I’m remedying that at the moment and have had Drukqs, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and Selected Ambient Works Volume II on repeat.
• Regrets List / Things I Did Good List — lastly after reading this post, I’ve made my own ‘regrets’ and ‘things I did good’ lists in Drafts, that I add to as things occur to me. It’s interesting how quickly patterns, both positive and negative, emerge when you are paying attention. I’m interested to see if I can convert noticing these patterns into lasting improvements and so will be continuing this experiment for at least another month.

Week Notes 017 — W/E 30 July 2023

• No shoots booked — the first clear week in a couple of months. So nice to get time to clear up all the admin that was pushed aside in order to meet deadlines.
• Celebrated the flexible schedule by taking Monday morning off. ‘Swimming’ lesson with Baby first thing, then off to a baby friendly screening of Barbie at the Barbican. Joyful carnage on screen and off. By the end, there was a line of parents against one wall flinging their babies around in mystical patterns to encourage them to sleep. I enjoyed the film itself: it wore its cleverness lightly, and its dumbness proudly. Great lines, sharp outfits and incredible set design.
• The bulk of the week was spent choosing images for my new site and sequencing them. I’m getting really close — just waiting for some display issues to be resolved. I feel like my work has progressed by a step change in the last two to three years — and I can’t wait to share it and get back out on meetings. I’ve mostly replicated and expanded on the structure of my current site, and I’m working on a ‘Places’ category to encompass some travel, cityscape and interiors work. I need a ‘Street’ category for the personal section of my site too, now that I have enough work to fill it out.
• First time out with my wife sans baby on the weekend. My mum and sister wrangled the baby while we went to see Groundhog Day at the Old Vic. I’m allergic to musicals, but I thought it was brilliantly executed. The handling of the daily reset deftly conveyed the frustration of the protagonist and the surreality of the premise, while evolving enough not to bore the audience. Maintaining forward momentum in a story about going in circles is a hard task and I was impressed with how it was handled. Tim Minchin’s writing was acerbic, raucous and raunchy in equal measure. The leads were charismatic, but I didn’t feel the chemistry between them. The set pieces and inventiveness more than made up for the lack of passion though.
• Back to using kettlebells for simple and functional workouts that are easy to fit in when I have 15–30mins spare. Lots of press ups and bodyweight squats in the gaps too.
• My favourite browser, Arc, has reached v1.0. I’m very pleased for them as I have been using it for months now and it’s become an indispensable part of my digital life. I love browsing websites full screen, copying URLs with a keyboard shortcut and being able access anything I need in secs using their multi-context Command Bar. I’ve used all the big browsers and this is the first one that feels like it’s doing something new. Arc has ditched the waitlist, so I encourage everyone to check it out.
• I’ve discovered Underdog Electronic Music School’s excellent YouTube channel and have been making my way through his videos. He has a real gift for teaching concepts in a clear and concise manner. I found him through his breakdown of Fred Again..’s key techniques and thought his Music Theory in 29 Minutes was by far the simplest explanation I’ve watched of the basics of a confusing topic.
• I really enjoyed this Conversations with Tyler interview with Noam Dworman on Stand-Up Comedy and Staying-Open Minded. He’s the owner of the Comedy Cellar and it was interesting to hear his take on how comedy is changing and evolving.
• My photobooks are on the bottom of our bookshelves, next to the play mat (a terrible idea, but that’s another story.) When the baby is occupied chewing on whatever has fallen into her clutches, I’ve taken to dipping into some favourite books. I used to make a song and dance of sitting down with a photobook — waiting for good light and uninterrupted time. As a result, I rarely looked at them. Now, because I grab and browse when I have a spare five minutes, I’ve spent more time with my photobooks than I had in the last year. Exiles by Koudelka is the one that I keep returning too. The ground he covered and the variety of scenes that he witnessed are mind-boggling. And this doesn’t even speak to the incisive eye with which he captured them. On these recent flip-throughs I’ve appreciated the classics like the angel on the bike or the rocket man, but also fallen in love with pictures that I didn’t even realise were in the book. He is a master of mood, light, and layering. I can’t wait to read more about the life behind the pictures in The Making of Exiles which also awaits me on the shelf.

Week Notes 016: W/E 23 July 2023

• I had to turn around the edit for my Wimbledon pictures over the previous weekend, which was a pain at the time, but meant that I had three days free at the beginning of the week. Finally got stuck into what I hope are the final stages of setting up my new site. I looked at the new site yesterday and am really pleased at how my work has progressed. It’s easy to feel like nothing is changing when you are head down, but little by little, the cumulative impact of project after project builds up into a body of work.
• I enjoyed two films by NYC street photographer, Chris Chu: a breakdown of his approach to a documentary project focussed on the iconic West 4th basketball court and a short interview film looking at the relationship between two fathers and their sons.
• More NYC photography goodness: Walkie Talkie with Aaron Berger. A relaxed and interesting interview with an NYC street legend, returning after a bit of time away from photography.
• Continuing on the YouTube tip, I find The Bioneer’s exercise advice from to be really helpful. Lots of pragmatic advice for building up functional fitness using a minimal approach. I think that the videos highlighting single exercises are great, and showed me movements that I practice most days like Hindu squats or hip bridges. His recent film about training for parents is great too. Yes, there’s lots of footage of him shirtless, running, squatting, and thrusting, but the information is high quality and backed by studies. (This might be a positive for you depending on your proclivities)

• Still reading Writing Tools, but slowed down a little as I switched to reading Built to Move by Kelly and Juliet Starrett. I need to refine my creaky writing skills, but first I need to address my creaky body… I like the format of the book: benchmark tests to find your limitations, followed by exercises to open up your range of motion. I’m burning through it as there is quite a lot of filler, but the core suggestions seem effective. I’m going to fit in a little batch of exercises every day and will see how I feel in a month. I like their idea, shared by The Bioneer, of adding movement practice into the gaps in the day. Press ups while processing files, resting in a deep squat while your tea is brewing or mobility work in front of the TV. Even if there’s no time for a full work out, there’s always ten minutes here or there to get the blood flowing. Little and often adds up
• Shot on Friday out of London at a beautiful location. Lots of different set ups — documentary images, interiors, gardens, portraits, and still life. Fun to stretch my skills under time pressure. Nice to shoot in mostly nice daylight too. First time using the MOLUS X100 on a shoot. My assistant handheld it with a white umbrella to for some grab-and-go portraits. More than powerful enough for a dim interior, integrated into existing ambience and a lovely light quality. With the umbrella it was a bit of a handful, so I’m going to look into one of their mini parabolic soft boxes.
• Back very late from the shoot, then edited all the following day until 0500 in the morning. Went to bed for three hours and then woke up to work through Saturday. Mid morning, my wife and I heard shouting outside the window and ran to check what was going on. Dark grey smoke was billowing a fire in a flat in our building. Luckily, the fire service arrived en masse shortly afterwards and managed to get the fire under control. No one was hurt, though the flat looked like it was gutted. It happened so quickly and was scary and chaotic — all the neighbours were out on the walkways trying to get people out of the flats nearest the fire. I saw one man stood on the balcony a couple of floors up from the blaze, enveloped in the thick smoke, taking drags on a cigarette while he watched the fire fighters working below. We went out for an hour as the flat smelled strongly of smoke and we needed to decompress. As soon as we got back to the flat I settled into The Cave and worked on the grade until 2100ish. It was a brutal few days — I spent such long stretches at my computer that my body ached. At least the slog bought me a few free days this week.

• This thread about the King of Spain’s tailoring by Derek Guy (@dieworkwear) was great. It’s clear that the king’s suits look great, but it takes the expert eye to point out the details that are creating the effect.
• We watched and loved Jury Duty. It’s ‘documentary’ following a jury on a trial in the US. There’s one catch: everyone is an actor except for one juror. It’s a joy to watch Ronald negotiate the bizarre characters and situations that he’s thrown into with warmth and grace.
• doubled up on two interviews with Fred Again.., Tape Notes 105 & Tape Notes 75, that are a brilliant insight into the making of his last two albums. Fred drops a lot of wisdom that is applicable to creative practice beyond music-making. I’m a sucker for song breakdowns à la Song Exploder but it was the advice that I could lift for my own purposes that resonated. I want to see how I can apply his suggestions like laying down a drone to avoid ‘blank page’ syndrome or using time constraints in the early stages can be applied to my own creative process. I think that I’ll chuck together a short post with some of my notes in the next few days.
• I’ve been working too much and haven’t been shooting enough personal pictures (apart from the tens of baby pics I’m snapping every day). I need to leave my Ricoh GR out and about in the flat so that it’s easy to grab and make time to head out into town for some street photography. I’m still looking for a new personal project, but maybe I should take Fred’s advice and run some mini-experiments to see what hits, rather than ruminating on the perfect concept?
• I picked up my new Brompton last weekend. Even though I haven’t had much time to ride it, I’m in love. It’s a marvel of engineering and so damn nippy. It’s a pleasure to ride. I can’t wait to get out and about on it now that things are quieter for summer…
• Baby T is growing and learning at full speed. Her hand to eye coordination is leaps better than even a week ago and I think that she’ll be reliably sitting up unaided within days.

Week Notes 013, 014, 015 — W/E 2, 9, and 16 July 2023

• I shot at the Serpentine summer do. It vies with the V&A for the coolest June art party, and for my money has the edge. Great guest list and nice flat, bright light. Lots of good combos and funny interactions (turns out that Paul Smith and Orlando Bloom are BFFs). Fun evening all around: I took some nice pictures, caught up with a few friends and talked to a pop star about kombucha. Great music later on too.
• Craig Mod’s pop-up newsletter Basie! Bop! Jamaica! blew me away. He travelled to 16+ jazz kissas in Japan’s smaller cities, then wrote a multi-thousand word essay about each venue and released them day by day on the trip. Oh, and he also documented every one of them with stills, video and audio recordings… It would be a staggering feat of creative endurance regardless, but to top it off the writing is excellent. He captures the personalities of the owners, talks about the history of jazz in Japan and American, the qualities of the music and performers, nerds out over the sound systems, and finally weaves it all together with personal experience and socio-political commentary on contemporary culture. It’s an improv masterpiece.
• Off the back of Craig Mod’s series I’ve been listening to a lot of the jazz albums that came up, like Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and Ryo Fukui’s Scenery, along with some old favourites of mine: A Love Supreme, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, The Köln Concert, Kind of Blue and more.
• I’ve been experimenting with Imagen AI to speed up the process of grading selects from large documentary or event shoots. When I’m in control of the light and using manual settings for e.g. a portrait, it’s easy to copy and paste styles across batches of images. However, on reportage-style shoots, the lighting conditions are unique to each image, so that approach doesn’t work. Often I’m using aperture priority and riding the exposure compensations dial, so the settings are inconsistent shot-to-shot. That means I have to tweak the brightness, contrast, and colour individually on 250–500 selects. And that is before I make use masks to make local corrections. I’ve sped up with practice, and can finesse about a picture a minute, but that still adds up to hours of computer time. I’ve used Imagen to create a custom AI profile trained on 3000+ of my pictures. I finish my edit, select the Lightroom catalogue within Imagen, choose the correct filters to bring up my edit and then upload them to the service. The magic grading pixies work their magic, they send me a notification when they’re done, and then I download my edits. They aren’t good enough to release — but I’d say that they get me 80-90% there depending on the image. I need to tweak every second or third pic for brightness or white balance and apply any masks that I want to shape the light. I estimate that it’s saving me at least two to three hours on every grade, which is a huge quality of life improvement. I particularly like that you re-upload your final edits to refine the model’s understanding of your preferences. I’ve nearly uploaded 6000 images, at which point they fine-tune your model, which according to Reddit is when it noticeably increases in power and usefulness. I’ll see how my profile changes post fine-tuning and assess how the cost adds up, but I think it’s likely to become a full time part of my process. They are releasing a beta version of a tool that is supposed to help with culling which I will play with, but I have had very mixed results with similar AI tools in the past. Generally they are great at identifying blinks or missed focussed, but bad at distinguishing between subtle facial expressions or gestures that mark out a great picture from a good one.

• Messed around with Pi AI. It’s an AI powered chatbot that you can talk to with a dedicated app, or in WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram DMs. It’s interesting, in that it seems to parse meaning well and reply with useful information. Apart from the slightly formulaic responses, it does feel a lot like talking to a person. I asked it questions about creative programming for generative art and got a nice steer on a good language for beginners and resources to get me started. It also gave me some good jumping off points for exploring the tracker music production workflow with a Dirtywave M8. Judging from the Discord, a lot of people are using it as a sounding board for creative ideas, to talk about philosophy and other ‘big questions’ or as a journalling / talk therapy aid. I can imagine that it would be good to talk you down if you are spinning out as it has a very calming and friendly conversational style. Over the summer, I want to go deeper on the newly available AI tools to see how I can use them to aid my creative practice.
• Started The Man from The Future, a book about John von Neumann. I listened to a brilliant podcast with the author which made me want to delve deeper into the life of this seemingly extraordinary man. It was a while ago, but I think that it was this one. In honesty, I hadn’t heard of him until a few years ago, when a physicist on a podcast declared that von Neumann was far and away the smartest person he had ever meet. Learning that this physicist also used to know Einstein made me really sit up and take notice. Who was this man whose genius outshone one of the most famous brains in history? Most impressive is the sheer breadth of his contributions: game theory, mathematics, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, ballistics, cellular automata, early computing, and much more. A lot of his discoveries laid the groundwork for the most important technologies shaping the present. Here’s another interesting podcast with the author that I listened to this week.
• I also started Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, after a recommendation in Robin Sloan’s excellent newsletter. I’m only ~50 pages in and it’s great — pragmatic, concise and non-dogmatic. I’ve found the quotes are particularly helpful — the writing is brilliant, and from writers with diverse styles, working across fiction, non-fiction and journalism. It’s a good book to dip in and out of and will likely find a place next to my desk.
• We needed to shoot Baby T’s passport photo, so of course I made a palaver of it. Most of our friends resorted to laying their babies on a sheet, but had to live with creases galore. I scoured the flat for a suitable white background and then realised I had the perfect solution — the large, minimally branded box for my Apple Studio Display. I placed baby over the branding, et voilà, studio quality white background… For simplicity’s sake I bounced a speed light off a white wall (plus a little of the ceiling), with the monitor box perpendicular to the wall. Was a nice soft light, if in retrospect a little too ‘toppy’. I should have moved the box further from the wall and aimed the light at where the wall meets the ceiling. It was much improved by my wife holding some silver card to lift the shadows and provide a second catchlight.

• Shot at Wimbledon at an editorial x commercial crossover. Small group of VIPs so not much to cover. It was raining throughout, but the balcony had a large roof over it which shaped the light nicely. The roof blocked the top light, which prevented the ‘panda-eyes’ look you get on an overcast day, resulting in beautiful soft light that wrapped around the subjects. Shot some nice safety portraits first, then made the best of the spotlights in the hospitality suite. When the key group disappeared in the middle of the day to watch the action, I started in on the edit and had most of the first pass finished before they returned.
• Shot a set of lifestyle marketing images for a startup. Their office was the uninspiring first location, but with a little light, some plant rearrangement and judicious use of shallow depth of field, we transformed a small corner of it into an aspirational apartment. We also squeezed a studio set-up and a ‘gallery’ out of the same end of the room. I hired in a few of the more powerful Aputure COB LED lights so that I could try before I potentially buy. We used the 1600D Pro and the 600D Pro, alongside my 300D II and smaller Zhiyun lights. I hired the 1600D to test a higher powered COB fixture, but as we were blending our lights with indirect daylight, we used it below 15% power all day. If the location at been close enough to street level to put it through the window, it would have been a different story: I’d have unleashed some fake sun onto the fake plants. The 1600D Pro and soon to be released Electro Storm XT26 are the embodiment of my dream lights from a decade ago. Lights that run cold, are nearly equivalent to 2.5k and 4k HMIs in output, and are a fraction of the weight, cost and power draw. I think that there is probably a 600D Pro in my future, or maybe a 600X for ease of blending with artificial light. The RGBWW versions look interesting, but I recently learned from a Youtube video that you get more colour information when you gel a daylight lamp, than if you use an RGBWW fixture to create the same colour directly. That means that I’m more likely to invest in daylight-balanced or bi-colour lights for maximum power output and gel them as required.
• Aside from the geeky specifics mentioned above, it was really nice to shoot something where I had the time (and an excellent assistant) to light each scene properly. It’s fun to nerd out about subtle nuances of bounced light, fake daylight and optimal shadows. Normally, I might only have three to five minutes with a portrait subject, ten max, so the focus is on making sure that the lighting is functional, flattering and reliable. Often I use a medium soft source (umbrella or bounced light) near the camera or available light for speed and simplicity. It’s a case of getting the shot in the bag, not lighting the shot as beautifully as possible, with all the subtleties that would require.
• I discovered the Gaffer and Gear Youtube channel when looking for reviews of the Aperture lights and have been obsessively watched older videos. The reviews have everything that you need to know — precise measurements, real world use-cases and comparisons to similar products. However, that’s not why I am watching them. Cumulatively the videos are a masterclass on lighting and rigging from an experienced gaffer. Every review contains at least one ‘ah-ha’ moment, little tip, or unconventional idea that I can’t wait to implement. Also, if you are watching to learn rather than shop, you can just watch the discussion on the first half of the video and skip all the technical measurements that make up the second half. In particular, I loved this cut from the archive: Best Advice I Ever Got. Yet again, Youtube turns out to be the best university in the world…
• I was gifted an Ooni pizza oven a couple of birthday’s ago, but as I’m in a flat with only a small balcony, we couldn’t use it without smoking out our neighbours or burning our block of flats to the ground. Recently we gave it to my wife’s sister and husband on long term loan and were (appropriately) invited around for the inaugural firing. It’s amazing. Nicely designed, easy to use, and most importantly, turns out perfectly scorched circles of heaven, pizza after pizza. We frazzled a few early attempts as it cooks so quickly, but got the hang of it soon enough. Can’t wait to use it again — I guess I better get my head down and try to cobble together the funds for the forever house & garden combo.
• A running theme of the last month is that balancing parenting with working is incredibly hard. Who knew?!

Links

To Read

• How to do Great Work by Paul Graham
• Everything Must Be Paid For Twice
• Computer Art from the 50s and 60s

To Watch

• Walkie Talkie — Trevor Wisecup — charm and chaos on the streets of NYC
• Making Designer Furniture We Can’t Afford — fun, dumb and brimming with creativity

To Listen

Andy Matuschak on The Lunar Society — on self-directed learning, the power of memorization, and the balance of freedom and discipline in education. Huberman Lab — Science-Supported Tools to Accelerate Your Fitness Goals — brilliant selection of tips and techniques

Week Notes 010, 011, 012 — W/E 11 June, 18 June, and 25 June 2023

Another set of week notes bundled for your reading (dis)pleasure…

I don’t think it’s worth accounting for the time week by week. The late nights, tens of thousands of images and numerous shoots of the last few weeks blurred into one amorphous endurance event. This isn’t comprehensive (I can’t talk about some of the projects), instead it’s a selection of takeaways and things that I want to experiment with or think about more in the future.

• I started with four evening shoots split between two venues. The four events were split into two pairs, with different guests at each, but following a nearly identical format. Welcome drinks on the first day at venue one and then a black tie gala dinner on the second day at venue two. It was both challenging and interesting to work through the déjà vu of shooting essentially the same job twice in the same week. Each evening I had to find new angles and approaches to keep the pictures fresh and my attention sharp. On the other hand, I could review the pictures from the first pair of days, then go into the second half of the project knowing where I messed up, what I over and under shot, where the light would be at a certain time, and how people would interact with the spaces.
• To a certain extent this is the kind post mortem I run after every shoot: What worked? What didn’t? Did I need more depth of field for the tight shots? What would have been a better shutter speed / ISO trade-off? Should I have asked for more portraits or prioritised candid moments? However, it’s rare that the review ⮂ shoot cycle is so short, and even rarer that I can apply what I’ve learned to an almost exact replica of the situation where I learned it.
• I enjoyed the scope of this project — in one evening I shot the scenography and spaces, documentary pics of guests, details of the food, two fashion shows, beauty shots of models wearing jewellery, a performance by a pop megastar, night time architectural shots of the venue’s exterior and a dimly lit after party. Despite being snobbish about photographing at events initially, it’s honed and diversified my skills more than any other photography genre. It’s taught me how to cover a variety of subjects quickly and effectively, even when I have little to no control of the situation.
• I shot two projects at the newly reopened National Portrait Gallery and one at the National Gallery. Having also shot at Tate Britain a few weeks prior, I can say that the light for ambient photography at some of London’s premier galleries is terrible. Legions of spotlights and high ceilings are a recipe for burned out highlights, panda eye shadows and luminous noses — a visual dish that is deeply unpalatable to me. I’m comfortable shooting in very low light situations, scenes lit only my candle light or a handful of lanterns for example, but straight-up ugly light is hard to deal with. The National Gallery is by far the worst in this respect. Not only does the light veer between harsh and sludgy, the main rooms are also incredibly dark.
• I had to be discreet on the first shoot at NPG, so I crossed my fingers, underexposed to save the highlights and boosted the shadows massively in post. (Sometimes using specific masks on hero shots to bring out faces.) For the second NPG shoot and the National Gallery shoot I decided to renege on my vow of purity and add a speedlight to my wide angle camera. I kept the longer lens free for ambient light images, and switched between them as the situation dictated. At the National Gallery, that meant getting safety shots/full lengths with flash and then shooting some super shallow DoF ambient portraits when in areas with nicer light. Despite the obvious differences in sharpness and directionality, the flash images integrated quite nicely with the other pictures. It helped that I shot it at a higher ISO, gelled the flash to tungsten, and used a wider f stop (f2–f2.8) and a slow shutter speed (1/15s–1/60s to mix in the ambient light) to mimic images shot in low light.
• I still don’t have a lighting solution that I’m happy with when shooting impromptu portraits or reportage in shitty light. I need to experiment more with flash on camera, to work out how I can integrate it into my style of shooting. I dislike how a speedlight makes me very obvious when shooting candid pictures. (I prefer to take the picture and move on without the subject even noticing.) My work camera + flash combo is large and cumbersome, and as soon as I take the first image, I announce my presence, changing the scene. For portraits it’s not so bad as I’m not in stealth mode. However, it worries me that I can’t see what I’m going to get through the viewfinder especially when I need to work quickly. I don’t want to hit playback to check that I got the picture, I want to see the light in the viewfinder before I trip the shutter.
• I’ve found TTL unreliable recently — I get two or three perfect shots and then a completely different lighting balance on next few images. I’m scared that I could shoot 5–10 pics of a VIP, then check the camera to find that the results are a dog’s dinner and I’ve lost my opportunity. I’m going to start experimenting with manual flash for consistency. My working distances are usually quite controlled and I can work out sensible defaults for a full length, landscape two-shot and a close-up. I’ve been practising this with my Ricoh GR III + LightPix Labs FlashQ Q20II with good results. This is my Goldilocks set-up for non-work parties — the camera is designed for one-handed operation and the flash has a tiny detachable transmitter for off-camera work. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a cute combo that people find funny… Particularly when I pop up in praying mantis stance, camera in one hand, flash held aloft in the other, grinning ear to ear. I’ve started carrying the GR in one pocket and the flash in the other on work shoots too, so that I can grab a quick hard flash shot when the opportunity presents itself. I used to hate the flash-on-camera look when I was younger but it’s really grown on me. I like projects where the photographer mixes photos using beautiful natural light with saturated hard flash pictures.

• I’m also looking into small continuous lighting options like the amazing new mini COB lights by Zhiyun — the MOLUS X100 and MOLUS G60. I love the idea of that much light from such a small package, coupled with a small hard source and enough battery to run for a while on low to medium power settings. Reviews are a little thin on the ground, so I might have to buy one to try out. I sometimes work alongside a great French celebrity portrait photographer. When he is shooting portraits at an event, he moves through the crowd with an assistant who carries a Profoto B10X on a pole. They locate their subject, the assistant lights them up using the flash’s modelling light through a mini-softbox and the photographer gets the pic on his medium format Fuji set-up. This approach allows him to work in chaotic and dark environments using a high resolution camera that would otherwise suffer in those conditions. I want something more minimal and inconspicuous than their gear; maybe something that I can hold myself, or light enough to clamp to furniture and bounce off the ceiling in hotel rooms/small venues. Still the idea is solid and I love continuous light, particularly if it’s a situation where I won’t have much time, control or second chances.
• I bought a new screen, my first in more than a decade, after it became impossible to calibrate my ancient Eizo CG234W with due to a software / operating system conflict. I went for the Apple Studio Display as I wanted something that would integrate with my all-Mac ecosystem without fuss. Gaining three new USB-C ports and the ability to charge my laptop via the screen are a bonus too. I bought a reconditioned VESA mount version so I can use a monitor arm to free up desk space. I needed to get down to work immediately, so I bolted its beautifully machined chassis onto the fugly grey plastic stand I salvaged from my Eizo. (Shudder) So far the screen is excellent — the extra resolution makes it much easier to assess how sharp a picture is and see people’s faces clearly in a group shot. The reflections on my standard glossy version are a little annoying (the window is behind me in my office). However, when editing/grading I like to work in what my wife and I affectionately call ‘The Cave’ — a sensory deprivation environment created by closing the blinds, turning off the lights and wearing noise cancelling headphones. In the gloom of The Cave, the reflections disappear; and when I’m not working on photography stuff, the reflections don’t bother me much.
• I had a last minute shoot at Ascot called in the night before. I scrambled to find a morning suit at 2100. I lucked out — my wife’s friend who lives 20mins away had one. Clearly, he has much fancier friends than me. I have a few suits and black tie on hand for various dress codes, but I draw the line at having a top hat on the kit shelf…
• I’ve shot at Ascot a few times and it never ceases to bemuse. It’s a such a strange mix of people, drawn together to have parallel but distinct experiences. It’s a playground for memetic desire. Everyone is aspiring, but in different directions, following different blueprints. Perhaps one year, I’ll get a press pass and attend to shoot street-style without the strictures of a commission? I want to read Wanting by Luke Burgis too, his book on René Girard and mimesis as I enjoyed his interview on The Knowledge Project.
• This has been nearly a month of complete work life imbalance — if I wasn’t shooting, I was editing at my desk until 0000–0430. I’m very grateful to have so much on, but the delivery schedule required so much computer time that it swallowed all other aspects of my life. Being so busy is great for my finances and building new client relationships, but the workload was totally unsustainable. As an assistant I used to freelance on projects for some A+ photographers who were shooting 2–5 days a week, often travelling internationally once or twice a week to get to the job. It’s mind-blowing to me that they managed to endure that pace for years on end without burning out. One famous photographer told me that his crew were the only friends he saw regularly — in his eyes they were his family. Working with him was a powerful experience for me — it made me reconsider whether I wanted to attain the specific vision of success that I had been striving for. What if winning is worse than losing?

Week Notes 007, 008, 009 — W/E 21 May, 28 May, and 4 June 2023

I’ve missed a bunch of these, so I’m bundling them up into quick summaries and kicking them out the door.

Week Notes 007 — W/E 21 May 2023

• I had a last minute shoot come in on the previous Friday, pencilling me to fly to Venice on Tuesday morning to shoot that evening. I was confirmed on Monday morning, which resulted in a scramble to book tickets as the prices climbed and prep for the shoot.
• The wrinkle is that Monday was also the day that we’d agreed to move everything out of our (thankfully small) storage unit and back to our flat. And the local Zipvan was booked. And the nearest entrance to our unit at the storage facility was broken. AND we have a 12-week-old baby who refused to help carry anything. This meant that we had to do three trips in a small car filled with kit, duffels full of clothes and various crates of miscellaneous crap, piled low enough that it wouldn’t avalanche the baby during a tight turn. The broken gate meant that each journey from the unit to the car required pushing a recalcitrant trolley through a near endless labyrinth, dodging minotaurs and rats as large as dogs. During any gap in the schlepping, driving or baby-placating we were checking and re-checking the rising flight prices waiting for the green light.
• I got an early cab to the airport, had an uneventful flight and landed in Venice around midday on Tuesday. I was on the same flight as the client, so I got whisked out of the passport queue, through security and onto a waiting boat taxi. God Tier airport process unlocked…
• Super intense trip with no down time. Pretty much straight out on a recce to the nearby island where the dinner would take place, then back to the hotel, 1.5 hours to prep kit and get ready, then a boat out to the venue. Helped with the table setting as time was of the essence. Fun and tricky shoot. Abiding by the rule that the key to a good party is to have a lot of great people crammed into a small space, things were almost impossibly tight. All the tables were butted up against the wall on side leaving only a narrow corridor between the free ends of the tables and the bar on the opposite side. I had to move into the gap between two tables, shoot as much as possible from that vantage point, then wriggle through the throng to the next between tables ‘trench’. I generally like to circulate through the crowd as much as possible when shooting, so I was happy that I could still come away with good pictures despite the constraints.
• I survived on the snacks that I bought at the airport for two days — Italy doesn’t have much for someone who is vegetarian and doesn’t eat dairy… Lucky that I quite like fasting otherwise I would have passed out mid shoot.
• The shoot needed an overnight turn around so I edited and graded until 0530 in the morning. And then had to get up at 0830 to go through the pics with the client before heading to the airport. I was already looking up the price of new MacBook Pros in the cab back from the airport in a bid to exchange money for speed and therefore gain sleep… My maxed out M1 Air is great for the form factor and I love the lack of fan, but it just doesn’t have the grunt required when applying AI masks or denoise to hundreds of images in Lightroom.
• Ended up going with a reconditioned M1 Max (64GB RAM, 32 Core GPU and 4 TB SSD). It’s nowhere near as elegant as my Air, but it races through common tasks in a fraction of the time. It’s a huge boost and it makes me wish I’d done it sooner. Still a millstone to carry around though…

Reading

• Atoms vs Bits — Developing an Intuition for Georgism
• Battery Ships
• Austin Kleon on Style

Listening

• Secret Life — Eno x Fred Again.. — So mellow and beautiful.
• Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes - The Lunar Society — brilliant interview with the author of The Making of The Atomic Bomb (sending it straight back to the top of my To Read List). It’s a rich and deep discussion focussed on the past, present and future of nuclear weapons, and much more besides.

Week Notes 008 — W/E 28 May 2023

• As it only happens every four to five years, I forget how annoying and long winded it is to set up a new computer. A couple of days of faffing and then a few more days of forehead slapping at key things that I had forgotten to set up. Numerous times, I would start typing the name of the application that I needed in the Alfred search bar, only to find that I hadn’t installed it yet.
• Used the laptop switch as an excuse for a digital declutter. Cleared out a bunch of junk from my Dropbox and streamlined the folder structure.
• two smaller shoots for a regular client, both of which I managed to despatch smoothly and quickly. Luxuriated in the power of the new machine when making previews and running AI processes.
• Missed the Taylor Wessing deadline like an idiot. I was working on a client project in the daytime, thinking that I would pull a few pics for the competition and enter them before the midnight deadline. Unfortunately, when I sat down to do that at 2130, I saw that the deadline had actually closed in the middle of the afternoon this year. Much swearing and then sullen acceptance. I was annoyed with myself as I had a few nice pictures to enter that may not be eligible next year. The positive spin is that it is a good excuse to shoot more for next year’s competition.
• Met my new sibling, who is a month younger than my daughter.
• Deep South London BBQ on the weekend, soaking up the sun in a friend’s garden.
• Walked out to the Kings Cross nature reserve, had a little walk around and sat out by the canal. It’s not nature in its awesome splendour, but it has a scruffy beauty that is charming. A nice place to go and sit with a book on a sunny day. Like with a lot of weekend activities, it’s a destination that gives you an excuse to walk and talk, and then walk back again.

Reading

10 Thoughts From the Fourth Trimester - Wait But Why Our kids were born days apart and he nails the feeling of the first few weeks with a newborn.

What Photography Has Taught Me About Music via Duncan Geere

24-Hour Black Screen YouTube Videos — A fun dive into a genre of Youtube videos that I new nothing about.

Listening

Dr Andy Galpin: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size, and Endurance — Huberman Lab

Week Notes 009 — W/E 4 June 2023

• a full week of stressful pre-production for a four day mega shoot starting the next week. Lots of last minute changes and mountains of emails.
• had a lovely weekend day out to celebrate my wife’s birthday early. My shoot the following week sandwiched her birthday and I knew that the edit deadlines would make it hard to do anything fun on the day. We went to the brilliant Ai Wei Wei exhibition at Design Museum. Wei Wei is one of my favourite conceptual artists — unlike many he combines powerful ideas with a strong visual aesthetic. A lot of conceptual work falls flat for me because the artist forgets to make it interesting to look at or experience. I don’t want to be told why something is good or thought provoking, I want the work’s form, content and presentation to encourage discovery and conversation. Also, the exhibition was one of my favourite things — a one room show… There was this incredible density of visual interest and meaning to be deciphered in the space — each of the pieces talking to and presented in relationship to all the others. The only downside was a Gallery Bore, who was expounding loudly about What It All Meant to his date. We had to strategically navigate the space to stay out of earshot.
• Nice collection of work by and that inspires Yinka Ilori on the first floor balcony too.
• We went for a brilliant lunch at Akub, a Mediterranean restaurant in Notting Hill after the gallery. The food was delicious and presented beautifully, but without fuss. We sat upstairs under the skylight and felt like we were on holiday.
• I’m sure other things happened during the week but I was swimming so hard to stay afloat in the email ocean, that I’ve blanked out everything else.

A certain kind of photography is in no small part a craft of access. Get access, and all you need to do is pull focus and get the exposure right, and beautiful images will fall out onto your lap. —Craig Mod

This quote from CM’s excellent new pop-up newsletter about jazz kissas in Japan, nails a feeling I have on many shoots. Specifically, how the places & people that I photograph hugely influence the quality of my images. I always make usable pictures — that’s part of being professional. But sometimes I’m dropped into a scenario so special that magic happens wherever I point the camera…

Week Notes 004, 005 & 006 — W/E 30 April, 7 May & 14 May 2023

I missed the last three weeks of weeknotes. A weekend ran away from me, followed by two more weeks… I’m rolling them all together here so I don’t break the chain. And now they are so late, I have to write another one almost immediately!

It’s hard to find the time during busy weeks, but weeknotes feel like a productive practice so far. They’re clarifying to write and I’ll feel that I’ll value having snapshots of my life and thinking week by week.

I want to avoid a pile-ups in the future, so I’ll be heeding James Clear’s advice for future issues:

When in doubt: keep the schedule, reduce the scope.

W/E 30 April

• Shot at the private dinner to celebrate the launch of Alexi Lubomirski’s new book in Claridge’s new art gallery. I loved the way he presented the prints without frames, mosaic-style, playing with scale and juxtaposition. I massively overshot, given the magazines needs (~12 pictures), but the extra coverage helped with the tricky lighting conditions. Due to bad planning / mixed messages about deadlines / desire to work when the flat was quiet, I worked late on both the on-the-night preview edit (0200) and then the final grade a few days later (0400). I love working in the early hours as I feel so peaceful and focussed, but I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution to distracted days. I get a huge amount done, particularly on projects I’ve been putting off, but it pushes my clock around, leading to a cycle of late waking and late working that getting more and more extreme. I often wish I was one of those larks who can jump out of bed at 0500 and get 3 hours of creative work in before the world wakes up.
• I really enjoyed My Life as a Courgette, a beautifully animated film set in a children’s home. It’s dark, funny, and philosophical, with an ease that is inimitably French. It doesn’t shy away from tough subjects but never slips into lazy pessimism or unrelenting bleakness. The visuals are a treat, with great attention paid to gesture that reveals character. I loved the styling of the vehicles, with their boxy, low-slung silhouettes and tiny wheels.
• On Friday, I walked past a small crew taking pictures of a model against the wall of my block. I thought that the background was a bit dull (photo snob!), so I invited them into the building to take pictures from the top-floor walkway and interior staircases. They had come to London from Japan to shoot for their fashion brand. The photographer had studied at LCF (or maybe somewhere else?) so she knew London well. I grabbed a quick pic of them, directed them to a few nice spots, and left them to explore.

W/E 7 May

• First trip out of London with baby last week — to the South Coast near Rye to visit my mum. Worked over the weekend before so that I could relax (hence no weeknotes). The day we left was particularly stressful. I worked until 0400 the night before to finish an edit. Then I spent the next morning locating every picture from my old site in my archive to export out in high res for my new site to upload while away. Of course, I did nothing of the sort. Time just dissolved into the aether throughout the week… It wasn’t totally in vain though. Going away was exactly the kind of artificial deadline that I needed to stop procrastinating and get on with the one thing that had been holding up work on the site for weeks.
• The trip was good, with mostly pleasant weather. Baby T gained a new nickname, Yuri, as she looked like a little cosmonaut in her car seat. We walked at an acute angle into strong winds on Camber Beach. We visited friends and had a tour of their House of Many Staircases. I ate veggie pasties and we drank all the drinks at the new cafe on Rye Nature Reserve. We marvelled at the wild orchids, tulips, and mega fennel at Great Dixter. We graciously accepted any and all compliments directed at our Cute Baby. We ate excellent pizza (while standing up and soothing T) at bucolic hipster paradise, Tillingham. We were mildly devastated to arrive at The Fish Shack at Dungeness to find them out of their famed fried potatoes. We drove home. We accept that this chronology is deeply garbled.

• Back to London to shoot street pictures around the Coronation. I’d hired a Leica M10-R to trial over the long weekend. I’ve been obsessing over the idea of buying a Leica digital rangefinder for a while now, but I wanted to try one out to avoid a very expensive mistake. The last film camera that I used was an M6 TTL, so it’s a way of working that I’m familiar with and enjoy, but I didn’t know if my desire to re-adopt that approach was pure nostalgia or G.A.S.. In any event, I picked it up on the Saturday morning from Leica Mayfair and then headed further south in search of action. I was a bit nervous at the prospect of taking a multi-thousand-pound camera and lens out into the soggy conditions, but my worries were soothed by the Leica rep. He said that the only reason they can’t call the camera weather-sealed is because there is no gasket to seal the lens mount and that they are otherwise pretty hardy. I still made an effort to keep the camera out of the worst of the weather and wiped it down regularly like Macbeth trying to wash his hands of imagined blood.
• The M10-R held up brilliantly in the rain and I enjoyed working in the rangefinder mode again. I love the RF viewfinder experience — you can see the action around the frame and there’s no mirror black-out to hide the moment that you captured. I also love the physical skills and mental acuity required to shoot with the camera — no AF, manual/range focussing every frame, guessing distances, making decisions about depth-of-field, framing, positioning, and exposure compensation to anticipate the needs of the next picture to present itself to you. It’s a very embodied way of working and it’s brilliant for sharpening your attention. My only frustration was with the slow start-up time. I was keeping the camera switched off and turning it on to shoot like I do with my X-T4s and GRIII. But the Leica’s slightly slower wake-up window meant that I missed a few nice opportunities. I think if I owned one I would just buy more batteries and leave it on while shooting, but as I only had one battery to last all day I had to baby it.
• I shot for a good few hours, before rain and Union Jack-induced burnout hit. I started at a small screening party in Grosvenor Square to get warmed up and get used to the camera. Then I walked down to Green Park, along the marshalled route to Hyde Park, down into the screening area near the Serpentine, then along to Piccadilly, and finally down to Trafalgar Square before wending my way home. I didn’t get anything amazing, but I really enjoyed the process and still got a nice set to document the day.
• Bumped into my friend Georgia by Tottenham Court Road tube on the way home. We sat outside a bar, huddled under the table umbrella, and had a catch-up. Then I shot a quick portrait of her at the base of Centre Point.

• I tried and failed to organise some more test scenarios for Sun and Monday. I wanted to use the camera in circumstances that reflect my usual working environments and was feeling grumpy and frustrated for not planning further in advance. Imogen sensibly kicked me out of the house on Sunday afternoon to shoot some street stuff to combat the aforementioned grumpiness. I walked into town via Regents Park and picked up my sister on the way. We walked down Portland Place to Oxford Circus and then curved down to Leicester Square via Piccadilly, before walking up to Tottenham Court Road to get the bus home from near Warren Street. I got a nice pic of an older Asian couple in Piccadilly and then one of my better street portraits — a lady and a young boy selling plastic children’s toys on the pavement near Goodge Street station. So even though I was bemoaning leaving late and missing the best light, it was still well worth it. The magic of street photography for me is that even if you get nothing but crap you’ve still had a good walk and spent a few hours paying closer attention to your surroundings than you would have otherwise.
• On Monday before taking the camera back, I went for a walk around Regents Park with Imogen and T, as well as Imogen’s friends and their kids. I’d been annoyed that I hadn’t had a chance to use the Leica in a documentary situation. But trying to manually focus on two children under 7 years old as they dashed around, rode on shoulders, demanded to be aeroplanes, and bedecked a buggy with picked flowers was the perfect test of whether I was fast enough to work with the M10 in a fast-moving situation. These were some of the nicest pictures of the weekend (and much appreciated). More and more, partially inspired by this post on The Online Photographer talking about the photographer’s responsibility as a documentarian, I believe that one of the key responsibilities of the photographer is to make pictures that document the lives of you, your family and your friends. Don’t sweat the arty shit for a day, forget your worries about ‘authenticity’, and release your aspirational desires. Make pictures of the friends, family, cute kids, great dogs, evil cats, and loveable oldies that are woven into your life. Everything is changing all of the time — and everything that you think is integral to your life will be gone forever soon enough.

W/E 14 May

• shot a quick job at the beginning of the week. Turned it around in good time. Apart from having very little time to shoot and some tricky mixed lighting, all went smoothly.
• Great day out at Photo London with Mathieu Chaze. I went for the first time last year (also with Mathew) and I’m not sure why I left it so long. Even when most of the work doesn’t resonate with me it’s a great place to wander around and bump into old friends or legends of the UK photo scene. We had coffee at a table next to Martin Parr in the morning and in the afternoon I nearly collided with Julian Marshall, a photographer turned painter who I used to assist when I was starting out. It’s a shame the weather was crap, as it curtailed the courtyard people-watching that was a big part of the experience last year. Lots of attendees were ostentatiously carrying cameras to let others know that they were phototographers. And to my eye, there were far more Leicas on display than seemed representative of the UK photo community…
• I saw a lot of individual nice pictures and some beautiful photobooks, but a lot of the work felt either obtuse, derivative, or corporate/cheesy, particularly in the central tent. There were still plenty of black and white ‘fine art’ nudes of a type that I thought died out in the 70s. High contrast T&A clearly still has a market.
• I’d already seen them at COB gallery, but Jack Davison’s incredible etchings printed from his photos were a highlight for me. I also liked Finnish photographer Aapo Huhta’s project Omatandangole and thought that Michael Christopher Brown’s post-photography, A.I. ‘reportage’ project, 90 Miles about the Cuban boat people and the conditions in Cuba that prompted their journey to Florida was a more interesting approach to generative imagery. Too many good single images to mention by name (shout out to insane talent coming out of Japan, as always). On the book front I really liked the light and mood in Nemurushima (The Sleeping Island) by Kentaro Kumon. It’s a series of quiet and contemplative pictures made on a small island that only has a dozen or so residents left. I also liked the Secret of Light catalogue from a Ralph Gibson retrospective show. (The person manning the store said Gibson found the show a little odd, as it felt like he was already dead). I really like Gibson’s moody and surreal B&W work from La Trilogie which is included in Secret of Light. But I enjoyed seeing his new-to-me contemporary colour work. It’s clean and minimal, and a little uncanny. All the trickery and symbolism of the work I was familiar with is gone, replaced with incisive attention to form and texture.
• Imogen swung by Somerset House with Baby T at in a break within rainstorms for Mathieu to meet our new addition. She slept through the entire process, so it wasn’t much more than ‘Look! We made a baby.’ I made my way home after Mathieu did his signing for his brilliant book Rock, Paper, Scissors
• Lovely social weekend. Breakfast with family, then a friend of Imogen’s came around in the afternoon for a baby viewing on Saturday. Coffee in perfect sunshine outside Italo in Bonington Square with one of Imogen’s authors, then on to Camberwell for an impeccable lunch at Imogen’s friend’s new flat. Light filled and suffused with calm.

Music

6°30'33​.​372"N 3°22'0​.​66"E by Emeka Ogboh — Ambient techno, experimental electronica, and dub sampling the day to day bustle around Ojuelegba bus station in Lagos.

Cendre by Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto — elegant and beautiful interweaving of Sakamoto’s piano and Fennesz’s electronics.

Shebang by Oren Ambarchi — delicate, intricate, and hypnotic.

Watched

Two great episodes of Paulie B’s Walkie Talkie series:

• Poupay Jutharat — written about here
• Melissa O’Shaughnessy — Melissa is such a brilliant interviewee — she’s great at dissecting her process, talking about her mentorship from Joel Meyerowitz, and advocating for new perspectives in street photography. She’s got some great quotes in her pocket too.

Read

Alice Zoo — Photographing Childhood

Austin Kleon — The Thing that Sticks Out — Perhaps the things that make you or your work weird are the most important things?

Listened

Two great interviews: Emma Hardy - A Small Voice

Mentors & Marketing w/ Zoe Whishaw

I loved this Walkie Talkie Interview with NYC-based, Thai photographer Poupay Jutharat (Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet ).

She’s got an insane eye for character, detail and juxtaposition that she applies it as ferociously on the street as she does at VIP parties. On top of that, she radiates positivity, drive, and love for photography. And she uses a pink flash that looks like a hairdryer. What’s not to like?

Avoid confusing the editor’s cold detachment with the inner critic. The critic doubts the work, undermines it, zooms in and picks it apart. The editor steps back, views the work holistically, and supports its full potential.

The editor is the professional in the poet.

From The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

Present, Spacious, Alive

Following on from the previous post, I loved this podcast/dharma talk

Christian Dillo on the case against happiness, the problem of having a problem with our problems, merely doing it, unconditional aliveness, the difference between pain and suffering, and saying ‘yes’ to the truth of your experience.

Suffering = Pain x Resistance

Christian Dillo on Pain and Letting Go

I.

We need to reverse the habituated get-away-from-pain dynamic and create a new turn-toward-pain dynamic. This turning toward is friendly or, as I will call it going forward, kind, because contrary to our common and deeply embedded habit of resistance, it accepts and even welcomes what is already the truth of our experience. If something is already the truth of our experience at this particular moment, why resist it, why not be intimate and present with it as it is?

II.

For most people, letting go of pain means getting rid of pain. This is an understandable error because the pursuit of happiness compels us to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. We can begin to enter a deeper understanding of letting go when we turn the idea upside down and explore what it means to let pain come. Look at it this way: letting go is the opposite of grasping and also the opposite of pushing away. Let’s look at both, one at a time.

From The Path of Aliveness

Week Notes 003 — W/E 23 April 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:

• Colombian Coffee Company — rough and ready coffee shop in the heart of Soho
• Loto — neighbourhood Italian in South Hampstead

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

• On Giacometti by Hania Rani
• Years of Ambiguity by Kjetil Husebø
• We’re All Alone in this Together by Dave

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:

• Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) — the oft-repeated cycle from user focus to investor focus, that causes the decline and fall of major platforms
• In praise of pastiche - Works in Progress via #394: Pruning by Jack Cheng

…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.

There Should Be A Guy

by Max Lavergne

There should be a guy who every morning rides his bicycle down to the main street and sets up a small glass case of beautiful cakes he has made. He should sell the cakes at a reasonable price to whoever comes. The cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring. They should be sumptuously iced and decorated with fruits and sugared flowers which are not only lovely to behold but genuinely delicious. He should sit on a low half wall and read a newspaper folded into quarters until the cakes are all sold. As soon as the last one is sold he should tie the glass case to the back of his bike and cycle to the market to buy fresh eggs and flour, chocolate, fruit, all the things he needs to make cakes for tomorrow. And then he should ride his bicycle home, where he should kiss the top of the low door frame leading into his widower’s cottage because it will always remind him of her. And then he makes the cakes for the next day. Now that’s what should happen. It should be happening already, in towns all over the country. Hell, all over the world. If it’s not then fuck it. Let the bombs fall. Let them turn the beaches to glass. Return us to hunter gatherers, cowering in caves. Miserable dirty people dying of cold when it rains for too long. Let us slowly work our way back up if we can’t get even that part right when it should be so obvious. See if the next crop are smarter. And if they aren’t then try again. As long as it takes. Let our distant descendents hide in the shadows of the brick walls we built. I don’t think that’s too extreme.

Link to original

# Week Notes 002 — W/E 15 April 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:

• NTS: Dust To Dust: The NTS Guide to Ambient Americana & The Early Bird Show w/ Spirit Blue & Lylla
• Tiny Desk Concerts: Fred Again.. & C Tangana
• Albums: Night Ride by Drumcorps, Gift from the Trees by Mammal Hands, Cheat Codes by Danger Mouse and Black Thought, The Gamble by Nonkeen, On Giacometti by Hania Rani and We’re All Alone in This Together by Dave

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

Week Notes 001 — W/E 9 Apr 2023

Why Weeknotes?

I decided to start writing weeknotes as a forcing function to help me release at least one piece of (low investment) writing weekly. The desire to write something ‘good’ for my Art + Attention newsletter means that I get stuck and have huge gaps between issues. It’s true that if I never release a new issue I will never release a crap issue, but this seems to be a suboptimal solution for someone who actually wants to release a regular newsletter. I hope that adopting a looser ‘catch and release’ approach to my ideas and posting in a space that feels less precious (i.e. I’m not bombing anyone’s inbox) will help strengthen my writing muscles and relax my perfectionism. I was inspired to write weeknotes from an old Interconnected post, A pre-history of weeknotes, that I read this week. Three of my favourite weeknotes writers are Phil Gyford, Disquiet, and Tom Stuart

Overview

I delivered my first post-baby shoot early in the week and then fell off a cliff productivity-wise. Or more accurately — I became very productive at doing everything that was at best tangentially related to The Important but Dull Thing that I had to do (sequencing and uploading images for my new site).

Choosing Simple and Done

I finally abandoned coding an Astro site to replace my current Squarespace portfolio. The final straw: an update left me unable to start my dev server with nothing but an impenetrable error to show for it. I decided to stop pretending to be a programmer and concentrate on what I’m good at: taking pictures and writing words. Better to go with a simpler no/low-code solution that I can spin up quickly and concentrate on making and releasing new work. In that spirit, I set up a 22Slides site.

In around two hours I managed to build something with 90% of the functionality of the Astro site that I’ve been faffing with on and off for months… HUGE shout out and thanks to Bryan Buchanan for the best and most responsive online support I’ve ever had. He even sorted some custom CSS to tweak the issues I was having with the stock templates.

I also decided to set up a micro.blog, so that I could get on with blogging, rather than waiting to start until I finished the new site. I like that I can use micro.blog to interact with people on Mastodon too, as the niche instances that I wanted to join weren’t taking new people. I plan to set up a ‘proper blog’ for long-form pieces in the future, at which point my micro.blog will be used for notes, single images, and interesting snippets; but for the moment I’m concentrating on writing and releasing.

It turns out that having a ~6-week-old baby is great to focus the mind and help recognise what is and isn’t a good use of my time. #productivityhack

Home

Put up some blinds that have been sitting in our hall for nearly two years. They were waiting for some much-delayed building work to be completed.

Two simple pleasures:

1. lying in bed and watching a slice of sunlight on the wall opposite grow into a square as your blinds quietly roll themselves up into their roost.
2. the feeling of an SDS drill zipping through concrete effortlessly, compared to your 12V cordless hammer drill grinding away in vain.

Stephen Leslie Street Photography Workshop

A slight cheat as I did this last Saturday, but it’s one of the more interesting things I’ve done recently.

I have mixed but mostly positive feelings about the day. I think I’ll write about it in a bit more detail and share pictures in another post. In short:

• I enjoyed being out and about all day shooting and walking with five other photographers. Photography can be a lonely business, so it’s fun to hang out and shoot in a relaxed way. I love walking around London people-watching and soaking in all its chaos and strangeness. Even if you’re not shooting, just having your camera in hand makes you pay so much more attention to what is going on around you.
• I’m not sure how much I ‘learnt’ and perhaps this might be what left me with a slightly anticlimactic feeling. I wasn’t expecting revelations and I think that Stephen’s central point is a good one — you need to ask yourself before each frame ‘Why am I taking this picture?’. I’ve been thinking about what I could have done to get more out of the workshop. I prioritised shooting and perhaps I should have spent more time walking with and talking to Stephen and the other students… But then the only way to really get better at street photography is shoot a lot of it. (Which leaves a nagging feeling that 90% of the learning experience would be replicated by going out and shooting by myself for the same length of time)
• the other students were less experienced than me, which I found helpful. I think of my street photography skills as a weaker area, so it was nice when a couple of the other participants commented on how close to my subjects I was comfortable working. This is something that I’ve been practising since a trip to Japan in 2018 so I was pleased to hear that I was making progress.
• I’m glad that Stephen talked me out of bringing a backup camera and other lenses. Instead, I went ultra-minimal and shot all day on the tiny but mighty Ricoh GRIII. When I photograph for clients I have to bring enough gear to cover all likely situations and some unlikely ones too. So when I shoot for myself it can be hard to escape that mindset. Even though I know from experience that the more barebones my set-up the better… Fewer decisions & less weight = more fun & better pictures.
• the light was pretty flat all day and we didn’t see anything really wild. However, I still came away with a good selection of B-/+ pictures. Working on the edit of these images at the moment.

On Repeat

• Cheat Codes by Danger Mouse
• Travel by The Necks
• The Gamble by Nonkeen
• Ultra Truth by Daniel Avery

Reading

• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

• The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo