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.
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door and then iterate and improve, rather than taking forever to create the canonical output (which is almost always outdated on release).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…
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.
I’m rawing near the end of The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I’m going to do a write-up of my notes once I wrap it. About 40 pages left. I’m still reading The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo too…
Read a couple of good articles over the last few days:
…traditional architecture has always tended to be structurally dishonest. So if this is what makes contemporary traditional architecture pastiche, then most traditional architecture has been pastiche since the faux timbering of the Parthenon. Contemporary traditional architects have most of the great builders of our history as their companions in guilt.
The modernist critic thus has two alternatives: either to concede that neither the modern nor the premodern traditional architect is a pastiche artist, or to claim that both are, and hence that Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque architecture – and potentially many others – should all be condemned as fake. The latter option is consistent but hard to take seriously. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, however important an understanding of structure may be in our appreciation of certain buildings, structural honesty is no more necessary to good architecture than originality is.
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.
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 ZenGardens. 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.
A quick tip that improved my street photography and made me more comfortable working closer to people when shooting:
Make sure that you have a reason for taking a person’s picture before you press the shutter:
if you’re spotted, you have something to say. You’re ready to smile and say “I love your hat/style/energy/the way you were sitting” or “You look great” etc. It has to be genuine — bullshit is immediately transparent. This diffuses potential confrontations and creates a brief but warm connection. It makes the interaction feel fun and playful, rather than creepy and uncomfortable. Almost all successful people photography is about making the subject/s feel comfortable — and if you aren’t comfortable you are never going to set people at ease.
much of online ‘street photography’ depicts random people, shot from too far away, wandering around. There’s no character, drama, or humour on display. It’s boring. Making sure you have a reason for each picture isn’t just a hack to avoid arguments, it leads to better images. If you seek a ‘why’ for each picture, you become more selective. You aren’t merely snapping whoever walks past or seems less intimidating to you. Instead, you’re sensitised to what is notable about people and situations — strong emotions, interesting gestures, punchy outfits, characterful faces, strange juxtapositions. Like all creative pursuits — success is as much about refining your taste as it is about sharpening your skills.
lastly, if you might interrupt someone’s day you should have a reason for doing so. In street photography, you’re collaborating with the world — and so it’s important that you treat your subjects with the respect they deserve.
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:
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.
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.
