Category: Photography

Categories
Memories Photographers Photography

Remembering Jay

Scott Loftesness - Jay Maisel Workshop 2014
Twisted - New York - 2014

There is a photograph of eleven people standing on the steps of a bank building in the Bowery, in front of a door someone had painted the word PRAY above, years before any of us arrived, in letters already flaking. The steps are covered in graffiti — a cartoon skull in the corner, tags in yellow and white chalk, the kind of accumulated city noise Jay Maisel spent sixty years walking past without walking past, the way the rest of us do. Somebody is holding a camera near their chest, not quite ready. Everyone is squinting. It was overcast, or the light was coming from somewhere none of us had figured out yet.

We didn’t know we were nearly out of time. Jay taught one more workshop after ours. That’s the whole arithmetic of it — we were the second-to-last class in a room that had held forty years of them, and none of us felt the weight of that standing on the steps smiling for somebody’s iPhone.

Inside, the building went up six stories, every one of them hung with prints — decades of Jay’s own choices about what mattered, printed and framed with no apparent order except his.

Continue reading “Remembering Jay”
Categories
AI Photography

The Price of the Cold

Two men are standing close to a brick wall trying not to talk, because talking wastes what little warmth is left in a body that has been outside too long. One of them has a camera — Jerry Schatzberg, a fashion photographer. His hands are jammed half into his coat pockets between shots. The other man has his collar up around his ears and a scarf wound twice, black and white, and he is not moving much, because moving costs heat, and heat is the one thing neither of them has enough of. Schatzberg raises the camera. His fingers, by this point, are not entirely his own. When he presses the shutter there is a tremor in it he did not order and cannot undo.

The picture comes out smeared at the edges. Bob Dylan’s face, in the frame, is dissolving slightly into the gray behind him, like a man photographed through a windshield in the rain. It is, by any studio standard, a bad photograph. Schatzberg knows it’s a bad photograph. He has made a career out of not taking bad photographs.

And it became the cover of Blonde on Blonde, which is the best rock album ever recorded, and in nearly sixty years nobody has managed to improve on it by reshooting it clean. The blur isn’t a decision. It’s a symptom — of two men standing in the cold too long, of a photographer choosing, afterward, to keep the evidence of his own discomfort instead of erasing it.

There’s a difference between an accident and serendipity that I don’t think gets said out loud enough, and it matters more than it used to. An accident is the cold — involuntary, uninvited, spent before you know if it was worth spending. Schatzberg didn’t choose to shiver. His hands moved because his body was doing what bodies do at a certain temperature, and the shutter caught what his hands actually did, not what he meant to do. Serendipity is what happens next: a verdict, rendered after the fact, that the wreckage of an intention was better than the intention itself. The accident is what makes the verdict possible. Without the cold, there’s nothing to render a verdict on.

I’ve been sitting with a large language model most days for the better part of a year now, watching it write, asking it to try again, watching it try again in a way that is never quite the same and never quite different enough to matter. Somewhere upstream of me there is a number called temperature, and I will never see it. Somebody else did, once, in a meeting, and decided that the word for controlled, pre-approved, refundable randomness should be temperature — the same word for the thing that made Schatzberg’s hands shake, the same word for the actual physical stakes of standing outside too long in January without enough coat — and then set it, and moved on, and nobody in that meeting laughed, because nobody in the room had ever been cold in a way that mattered to the work.

Picture the room instead. It is climate-controlled to sixty-eight degrees, humidity held flat, year-round, by a building management system nobody thinks about until it fails. Somewhere in it, the hardware is generating your next five versions of a photograph like the one on Blonde on Blonde. Nobody in that room is going to lose feeling in their fingers today. Nobody’s collar is up. I don’t know his name — nobody outside the building does — but somebody like him tuned the sampling distribution and went home at six. That’s the guy in the good suit. He built the weather. He never once stood in it.

The small model inherits conclusions. It never inherits the cold. Whatever accidents shaped the teacher model’s own training — whatever costly friction produced the insight in the first place — the student model gets none of that weather. It gets the photograph, cropped and sharpened, with the blur removed because somebody along the way decided the blur was noise instead of signal — the way Schatzberg, a lesser photographer, might have reshot Dylan clean and thrown the bad one away. It is heir to a serendipity it never earned, because it was never present for the accident that made the serendipity possible. It is, in the most literal sense the industry means by the word, cheap.

I keep coming back to the fact that nobody at the API layer is shivering. That’s not a complaint, exactly. It’s just an observation about where the cost went. Somewhere in the training data, some human being was cold, or scared, or holding a fish that was starting to smell, or standing on a stepladder with ten minutes before the traffic came back, and that person paid a real price for a result they couldn’t yet know was good. The model downstream of all that gets the result without the price.

Two rooms, then. In one of them it is January in New York and a man’s fingers have stopped entirely obeying him. In the other it is sixty-eight degrees, always, on a Tuesday and on a Sunday and at three in the morning, and the machines are making you nine more versions of that same blur. Sixty-eight degrees. A number, upstream, that you will never see.

Categories
AI Learning Photography

Autopilot

“Superb photographs are not just taken with cameras. They come from within you, your eyes, your mind, your heart, not ice cold equipment.” Fan Ho

There’s a half-second on the street, somewhere between seeing a frame and shooting it, that used to take me whole minutes. Early on, with a camera in my hands on the streets of San Francisco or on the subway platforms in New York, I’d see something — light falling a certain way, a gesture about to resolve into a gesture — and I’d think my way through it. Assess the composition or the angle. Worry about the background. By the time I’d worked it out, the moment might be gone, replaced by some lesser version of itself.

That doesn’t happen to me anymore, and I couldn’t tell you when it stopped. Somewhere along the way the thinking disappeared and the shooting stayed. I see the frame and the shutter goes, and only afterward, looking at the file, do I understand what I saw. I didn’t explicitly decide to skip the thinking. It just stopped showing up, the way a habit eventually stops asking your permission. Or how driving a car becomes second nature.

I think about this because of a problem the AI labs have been calling continual learning. The AI models we use are like brilliant interns. They can solve a hard problem at nine in the morning and a harder one by five, and they’ll astonish you doing it. But every session starts over from zero. Whatever they got right on Tuesday evaporates by Wednesday, the way a dream is gone by the time you’ve found your slippers.

The industry’s first answer was to give them a longer memory — let the window hold the whole case file in front of them, all the time. This works for a while, the same way it would work for me on the street if I stopped and re-derived the exposure math for every frame. But that isn’t how I shoot anymore. I don’t have the math open. I have what’s left after thousands of frames did the math for me and then got out of the way.

Based on some exploration I did this morning using AI I found three different AI research efforts that are now chasing that gap, from different angles, none of them all the way there.

A team out of Stanford and NVIDIA built something called TTT-E2E, which lets a model keep adjusting its own internal weights while it reads — not just holding the page in front of it, but being changed by the page, a little, as it goes. It runs thirty-five times faster than the brute-force method of remembering everything, because it isn’t remembering everything.

Google’s research arm published something called Nested Learning around the same time, built on the idea that a mind isn’t one system learning at one speed, but several systems nested inside each other — some updating by the minute, some by the year.

And a scrappier strand of work called self-distillation has models teaching cheaper versions of themselves, not by handing over a transcript, but by training the cheaper model to arrive on its own at whatever the well-informed version would have concluded.

None of this is what happens when I make a photo. Not yet. But it’s aimed at the same gap I live in every time I shoot before I understand what I’m shooting. The gap between having the math and having the eye.

I once asked Doug, a good friend who’s spent as many days on the street as I have, how he knew when to press the shutter. He didn’t have an answer, not really — just a shrug, and something about the moment feeling complete before he could explain why. That shrug took him years to earn. He didn’t keep the years. He kept the shrug.

And then a few years ago Doug did something I still don’t fully understand. He abandoned digital and went back to film. Not for any project, not for the look of it — he could get that in post if he wanted it. He went back to the actual mechanics: loading a roll, metering by hand, often using a tripod, etc. I needled him about it some, the way you’d needle a cigarette smoker who’d taken up a pipe instead, as if the inconvenience were the point. He told me he wanted to slow down, and that film was the only thing that reliably made him do it. Twelve frames and then you stop and reload and you can’t fix it later. The very friction he’d spent decades shooting his way out of, he went looking for again, on purpose.

I don’t know what to do with that, except to notice that he’s the same man who can give me the shrug and also the man who walked back toward the thing the shrug had replaced. Maybe that’s the part the labs haven’t gotten to yet, underneath all the vocabulary of weight updates and meta-learned initializations. Compression is the whole point, until the day it isn’t.

Note: This line of thinking started with a recent essay by Dwarkesh Patel on what he calls continual learning. It’s become a real focus of his thinking about how we get to a better future with AI.

See: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm

Categories
Cuba Photography Street Photography

Havana, In Deep

Dangling Conversation - Havana - 2013

There is a box between them with a screen in it, and to this day I do not know what it is for. It could be for sifting. It could be for rolling. It sat on the table in that Havana market like a piece of furniture too tired to explain itself, and the man rested his forearm on it the way men rest their forearms on things that have been useful to them for a long time, without needing to look at it. A couple of guys a few steps off were selling meat, and somewhere a radio was losing a slow fight with distance.

He was asking her something. You could see it before you could hear it, if you could have heard it at all, which I could not, standing twenty feet away with a camera and no Spanish worth the name. His eyebrows were doing the work. His mouth was doing the work. The cigarette in the corner of his lips had gone unlit and forgotten, a prop in a scene that had moved past needing it.

She had not expected the question. That was the whole of it, the thing the photograph is actually about. Above and behind them the light came down through warehouse glass gone frosted with age, softened, the hard edges sanded off. It had been falling on that table for years before either of them sat down at it. A woman’s face has a setting it returns to between thoughts, and hers had been somewhere else — the work, the heat, the cigarette she’d just lit, which she now held between two fingers like a held breath, smoke rising into that same light, catching it, going from invisible to visible to invisible again. Then he spoke, and the setting changed. Her eyes came around to him sideways, the way eyes do when the rest of the head hasn’t decided yet whether to follow. Caught. Not afraid — caught, the way you’re caught remembering something mid-sentence, or caught by a question that arrives at an angle you didn’t see coming.

They had stepped away from whatever the work was — the particular slackness of people on a break, elbows down, shoulders forward, the posture of two people who have stopped doing the thing they get paid to do and have not yet decided to start talking about anything in particular, except that he just had.

Neither of them knew I was there, and I have never quite settled how I feel about that. I took something from two people who never agreed to give it. I have made my peace with it the way photographers do, which is imperfectly, but I have not stopped thinking about it. This is the only kind of photograph worth making all the same, the kind where you are not in the room, not really, where the camera has gone as invisible as the screen on that box, recording a question and an answer that the two of them will forget by the end of the day and that I will keep for the rest of my life, lit by a window neither of them ever turned around to notice.

What they were talking about, I will never know. I have looked at this photograph for thirteen years now and I still want to know.

Categories
Monochrome Photography New York City Photography Photography - Black & White

Bookends

Bookends - New York City - 2010

The tile is the first thing, and it should be. Count the squares if you want — institutional cream, grouted in a pattern nobody alive remembers choosing, the kind of tile that has been absorbing the heat and noise of trains since before anyone on this bench was born. This line has been running since 1904. The platform across from it, the old City Hall stop, closed in 1945 and now exists only as a rumor riders pass through without seeing, a loop the express makes for no reason except that turning around takes track. Everything in this photograph is standing on top of something that used to be a destination and is now just a curve in the dark.

Seven people are sitting on a bench that has nothing to do with any of that history, and everything to do with it.

Start with the one who’s still here. T-shirt, checkerboard skull, gym bag held against his ankle the way you hold something you can’t afford to lose track of. His hands are clasped between his knees, not relaxed, not nervous — occupied. Everyone else on this bench has gone somewhere else. He hasn’t. He’s looking off toward the tunnel mouth with the specific stillness of a man doing arithmetic about how late he already is, and the bag at his feet is doing exactly what gym bags do at that hour, which is stand in for whatever he’s actually carrying.

To his left, a woman reads a paperback — Wilde, from the spine, which is its own small joke on a subway platform, a story about a man who doesn’t age sitting in the lap of a woman waiting on a train that’s already late. Her purse, gold, sits on her knees like a paperweight holding her place. Next to her, a woman in a cream jacket has wired herself into something private through a pair of earbuds, hands folded over a small plaid pouch she’s guarding like it’s worth more than its size suggests. Two men at the far end have given up on consciousness altogether — one with his chin dropped into the posture every commuter eventually perfects, the other with his head against a fist and a phone somewhere near his ear, gone in whatever direction that call is taking him.

This is what a downtown platform in lower Manhattan does to seven strangers at whatever hour this was: financial district behind them, City Hall and the courthouses above, the bridge somewhere overhead carrying its own century of foot traffic — and none of it matters to the bench. The bench doesn’t know what borough it’s in. It just holds people until the train comes and takes the holding away.

The photograph is called Bookends, for the two men slumped at either end, and that’s the obvious read. But look again at who’s in the middle — the reader with her book, held between two men who have shut the world off completely. She’s the only one inside a story while sitting inside someone else’s. That’s the trick of the title. It sounds like geometry. It’s actually about who, on a bench like this, is still willing to be somewhere other than gone.

The train would come. It always does, eventually, on a line that’s been doing this since 1904, two minutes or eight minutes late, and it would take all seven of them in whatever direction they were waiting for, and none of them would know they’d spent four minutes on a bench old enough to have held this exact scene ten thousand times before — six people who’d left, and one who, for reasons of his own, hadn’t gone anywhere yet.

Categories
Creativity Photographers Photography Serendipity Writing

He Taught Us How to See

Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.

Continue reading “He Taught Us How to See”
Categories
Menlo Park Photography

Sakura

On my morning walk, a great blue heron and a beautiful flowering Japanese cherry tree. Lovely start to the weekend!

Great Blue Heron
Sakura – Flowering Japanese Cherry

Read about a 1,200 year archive of Japanese cherry blossom dates in Japan.

Categories
Apple iPhone Photography

Take Better Photos on iPhone

I recently attended one of the new Today at Apple workshops that was all about taking better photos on your iPhone. I attended the session at the Apple Park Visitor Center which is just adjacent to the big “Apple ring” building in Cupertino.

I’m a very experienced user of the iPhone’s Camera app and also am very familiar with editing images in the Photos app. But I was curious to see how Apple was teaching photography in this new workshop – and I’m glad I went! There were about 15 others also participating (in a very busy venue filled with folks looking at all manner of Apple products before tomorrow’s kickoff of WWDC week at Apple Park.

The workshop began with a review of the Camera app that walked through all of its capabilities for both photos and videos. It was a great reminder about some of the features (and important settings) in Camera.

Next was a workshop breaking out how to take various kinds of images. Most interesting was the discussion and practice using portrait mode with suggestions like always shooting portraits using the Mac telephoto lens to cast your subjects in the most favorable way.

The session ended with a review of the editing capabilities of the Photos app. The workshop was taught in a fun and positive manner that made it quite enjoyable. I’m glad I participated!

Categories
AI: Large Language Models AI: Prompting Photography

Creative Image Analysis with an LLM Partner

I came across a fun experiment being done by Mitchell Lensink which he shares on one of his blogs.

He takes one of his photos, feeds it into one of the AI large language models and asks the LLM to produce a detailed description of the photo. He then continues by asking the model to create a new image based upon the description it produced as part of its analysis.

I tried this out on a few of my images and enjoyed seeing the results. Here’s an example…

Prompt (taken from one of his examples): Please describe the attached image as well as you can. Don’t skimp out on details and make sure you will be able to understand what’s in the image when you read the description. You need to be able to form a mental picture of the image, without actually seeing it.

Here’s what Google Gemini 2.0 Flash produced:

Imagine a serene lake bathed in the warm glow of either sunrise or sunset. The sun, positioned towards the upper left of the frame, casts a brilliant light that flares slightly around the edges of the tall trees lining the left bank. These trees are silhouetted against the bright sky, their dark shapes contrasting sharply with the golden light.
The lake itself occupies the majority of the frame, its surface reflecting the sky and the surrounding trees like a mirror. Gentle ripples disturb the otherwise smooth surface, creating subtle patterns of light and shadow. In the middle of the lake, a fountain sends a spray of water upwards, catching the light and adding a dynamic element to the tranquil scene.
The far bank of the lake is also lined with mature trees, their foliage appearing lush and green where the light touches them, and darker in the shadows. A low wooden fence runs along a portion of this bank, suggesting a pathway or boundary.
In the foreground, along the near edge of the lake, there’s a patch of vibrant green grasses interspersed with delicate white and yellow flowers. These plants are in sharp focus, drawing the viewer’s eye into the scene and adding a touch of natural beauty in the immediate foreground.
The overall atmosphere is peaceful and picturesque, a moment captured in time where the natural elements – water, trees, light, and flora – come together in a harmonious and visually appealing way. The air likely feels still and the sounds would probably be soft – perhaps the gentle splashing of the fountain or the rustling of leaves.

Wow! That’s a description that goes well beyond anything I might have written to describe my photograph! Lots of details and new insights that help us see more deeply into what’s in that image.

And here’s the next step – the image it produced when I asked it to create a new one based on the description above:

That’s a very different image but I can see how it got there!

This little experiment is worth playing with some more I think!

Categories
Black and White Friends History Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White

Special People: Robert Buelteman

A few days ago the Friends of the Atherton Library held a special speaker’s event with one of my favorite photographers, Robert Buelteman.

Robert Buelteman – May 2025

I first came across Rob’s work years ago when all of the a set of his beautiful black and white photographs were hanging in the Village Pub restaurant in Woodside. I always enjoyed seeing those photographs on the walls of the Pub – they helped set the mood of the place for me.

Those photographs hanging on the walls of the Pub came from a unique experience he had over the course of a decade when he had unusual private access to the lands of the Crystal Springs reservoir area – what he calls the Unseen Peninsula. Later he had similar access to the Jasper Ridge Reserve on the grounds of Stanford University. In other words, his images in this series aren’t of places you’ve seen before – because you’ve never been where he’s been!

(Unfortunately, a few years ago, in a change that perplexed me frankly, the Pub took down his work and switched to a more eclectic gallery group of photographs.)

Buelteman lives relatively close by over on the Pacific coast. One fall weekend I noticed he was holding an Open Studio event at his home so I headed over to meet him and learn more. He’s quite an originalist when it comes to sticking to film for his photography and eschewing any use of digital image enhancing tools. He prints his own black and white images in his home darkroom. He also has another whole separate body of work of very colorful and more abstract images based on an unusual technique he pioneered using high voltage to illuminate patterns in leaves and other natural materials.

During his recent talk at the Atherton Library, Rob told the backstory to his gaining access to Crystal Springs and of his many experiences exploring that otherwise off limits area. I very much enjoyed how he told that story!

Please be sure to checkout his work at his website where you can also add yourself to his mailing list to learn of future events.