I recently purchased Conversations with Contemporary Photographers, following my recent reading of On Street Photography and the Poetic Image. As a bit of a surprise, I discovered that my recently purchased book included a strip of exposed Kodak 100TX film. I don’t think I’ve actually seen or held a strip of physical film before and I certainly haven’t ever tried to digitize it before today.
Given that this was a bit of a lark I ended up using Filmbox to create quick digital scans. This is a an iOS application where you hold the film a few inches away from a white screen and, then, use the application to capture any given frame.
I can’t claim that the process is perfect nor that the results are spectacular. But they do have the effect of letting me see more clearly what the different frames on this thing strip of film more clearly look like.
None of these photos were made by me. I have no idea where they were made. But I suspect the film is from within the past 20 years or so, based on the clothing when when the book was published. All of them are reproduced, below, with the only ‘edit’ being to fully convert them to black and white.
One of the best things about the iPhone is that each photo that you take automatically can be geolocated. I really appreciate this because I can quickly ‘zoom into’ different parts of the world and see the images I took in that place.
However, I take very few iPhone photos these days. For the past several years almost all of my images were made on either a Fuji X100F, Leica Q2, or a Ricoh GR or GRIIIx. None of these cameras have GPS modules. The result is that they do not natively add geolocation, or GPS, information into images metadata.
Fuji and Leica do have apps that you can use to add GPS information to photos taken with their respective cameras. However, actually setting them up takes a number of steps. Moreover, it requires you to have — and open — applications associated with the camera I’m using at any given time.
Instead of using manufacturer-specific applications I have purchased lifetime licences for Geotags Photos Pro 2 and Geotag Photos Tagger.1 In Canada, the Geotags Photos Pro 2 was just $15 and Geotags Photo Tagger is $12. While not free, the I use the applications each week and I’m well below $1/use at this point, and all of my photos for over the past year are accurately tagged.
Using the applications, and adding the metadata, is very easy. Once you ensure that you’ve set the timezones up correctly between your camera and the application….you’re finished. All you need to do is activate Geotags Photos Pro 2 ahead of going out for a photowalk (I tend to have it collect the GPS information every 5 minutes) and, after the photowalk, I put all my images into Apple Photos and then open Geotags Photos Tagger to apply the GPS information to all the images I’ve taken.
That’s it: once you’ve done this you’re done.
As a street photographer I’m most interested in posting photos with names that include the cross-streets of where an image was taken. So having GPS information is helpful for this purpose. But when I’ve been out for hikes it also does a good job locating different photographs that I’ve made — so long as my phone can get geolocation information I can then add the data to my mirror less camera images.
In conclusion: If you’re looking for a pretty easy, and affordable, way of adding GPS data to your images I can’t recommend these two applications enough!
These applications are available for both iOS and Android. ↩︎
Like many other photographers I regularly share my images through a social media platform. I also sometimes post them on this website. And that’s fine and good. And because it’s so normalized it feels very safe; while I might get positive comments from other users it’s the not the same as sharing my work where it might be assessed or publicly reviewed by people who are far more experienced by me, and where those considerations might she shared with a very large set of viewers.
Over the past year I’ve tried to push myself out of my comfort zone. I’ve been more active in thinking about street photography and sharing it with a part of the photographic community — the Photowalk Show — and then sometimes having those thoughts shared with Neale James’ other listeners. I submitted a few photos to a competition for the first time. I described for the first time the motivations and philosophy that underlie my street photography to a (friendly) group of strangers while also sharing an associated sequence of my photographs. I’ve had one of my photos highlighted in a roundup by Glass. And so on.
The White House, Washington, DC, 2023
But the scariest thing has been associated with my postcards project. To be clear, actually printing those postcards wasn’t scary at all! But actually sending them to people — with the prospect they would look at a cohesive bit of my work and then offer commentary to potentially hundreds or thousands of people — has been intimidating because it constitutes an exposure of my amateur photography to an otherwise unknown set of publics.
Crescent & Cluny, Toronto, 2024
I’m not afraid of publicity or engaging with publics. I’ve been very involved in public life for the past 15 years, and am as comfortable speaking with leaders of government or other senior leaders as I am appearing on television and speaking to tens or hundreds of thousands of people. But the sharing of my photographic hobby is different because it isn’t a domain where I’m a well-credentialed expert: I’m very much a learning amateur when it comes to photography. While I take my hobby very seriously I don’t have the skills or experience that parallel those of a more seasoned or professional photographer.
Yonge & Dundas, Toronto, 2024
I recognize that sharing my work, be it with NealeJamesandhisPhotowalkPodcast, or with Ted Forbes and his Art of Photography YouTube channel, has been a real step for me. It represents my ever deepening appreciation for the art form and my starting to explore ways of more broadly sharing my work, as well as developing increasing confidence in what I’m making. I’ve got an long way to go in deepening my expertise in making the kinds of photos I want to make but I feel more confident in what I’m doing, today, than I did even a year ago.
I bought the new iPad Pro (2024) as soon as it was available and absolutely love it. The upgrade from the iPad Pro (2018) is definitely justified for me.
I didn’t buy the Magic Keyboard at the same time, both to spread costs over a longer period of time and, also, in the hopes of getting the Magic Keyboard on a sale or discount. I do the majority of my personal writing on my iPad these days, and so I’ve been missing the keyboard on a weekly basis.
Fortunately, I managed to snag an open box Magic Keyboard that’ll be arriving, soon. Looking forward to having a full keyboard for writing in the near future!
This is one of my 12 preferred landscape/cityscape images from 2023, which I created (but didn’t print) alongside my 2023 Postcard project.
The photograph has a few things happening to my eyes: there’s the wildness in the foreground and a bit of roughness with the graffiti, that then passes into the rustic fortress that defended Toronto over a century ago, and then the new/under construction parts of Toronto. While it formally lacks any humans in the scene it radiates humanity in each gradation of the image, while also communicating a kind of evolution of Toronto’s emergence over time.
Of note, the campaign used a covert artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced software package to create fictitious online personas, representing a number of nationalities, to post content on X (formerly Twitter). Using this tool, RT affiliates disseminated disinformation to and about a number of countries, including the United States, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ukraine, and Israel.
Although the tool was only identified on X, the authoring organizations’ analysis of the software used for the campaign indicated the developers intended to expand its functionality to other social media platforms. The authoring organizations’ analysis also indicated the tool is capable of the following:
Creating authentic appearing social media personas en masse;
Deploying content similar to typical social media users;
Mirroring disinformation of other bot personas;
Perpetuating the use of pre-existing false narratives to amplify malign foreign influence; and
Formulating messages, to include the topic and framing, based on the specific archetype of the bot.
Mitigations to address this influence campaign include:
Consider implementing processes to validate that accounts are created and operated by a human person who abides by the platform’s respective terms of use. Such processes could be similar to well-established Know Your Customer guidelines.
Consider reviewing and making upgrades to authentication and verification processes based on the information provided in this advisory;
Consider protocols for identifying and subsequently reviewing users with known-suspicious user agent strings;
Consider making user accounts Secure by Default by using default settings such as MFA, default settings that support privacy, removing personally identifiable information shared without consent, and clear documentation of acceptable behavior.
This is a continuation of how AI tools are being (and will be) used to expand the ability of actors to undertake next-generation digital influence campaigns. And while adversaries are found using these techniques, today, we should anticipate that private companies (and others) will offer similar capabilities in the near future in democratic and non-democratic countries alike.
Neale James, host of the Photowalk, put out a call last month where he asked listeners to the podcast to offer some thoughts about social media. The episode that arose from listeners’ considerations is live and I’ve provided my (slightly edited) full response to Neale below.
By way of background, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about social media professionally in a number of ways, used it professionally to affect political change, and have also used it personally now for over 20 years at this point.
How do you use it?
One of my many positive early memories of social media is how, over 10 years ago, I and a series of cybersecurity researchers used Twitter to coordinate an incident response that led us to realise that the government of Iran was intercepting Google traffic being delivered to residents of Iran. That led to the resolution of the issue and stopped that government from conducting surveillance of its residents using the technique in question. So a good thing! Overall, up until about a year ago I used Twitter constantly for professional purposes.
However, the implosion of Twitter under Elon Musk, combined with moving into a privacy regulator’s office, has meant that I’ve stepped back from the same professional presence. I’ve trained the LinkedIn algorithm so it surfaces valuable professional content in my current role, but I don’t really use other social media professionally at this point.
Personally, the only truly valuable social media service that I use, and participate on, is Glass. It’s a small and paid photo sharing site. The community is positive and active, and it features interesting photography from around the world. I’ve also been blogging, now, since the 2002, and continue to keep that up as another outlet.1
Do you engage more, or less, with social media than you once did?
Less than in the past. Some of this is time. Some of it is, as mentioned, due to changes in the networks (e.g., Twitter) or the scattering of the communities (see again: Twitter) and the changing of my job.
I continue to use Glass, however, with a high degree of frequency and visit once or twice a day to see new images and I post one image per day.
What is your favourite platform and why?
For photographic purposes, Glass. It’s not as interactive as some other services which is fine, really, because I can go in and see things/comments, and then leave. There isn’t an algorithm that’s trying to keep me interested in perpetuity. It’s a healthier way for me to interact with other people online.
Explain your feelings about the currency of likes…
They’re…not good? I mean, they give quite the dopamine hit! But it also interferes with why you might create work, or explore producing new kinds of work. We know that certain kinds of images will get more likes due to smaller screens and shorter attention spans as we skim images; removing likes — or at least deprioritizing them in the user interface — can have the effect of encouraging people to explore different kinds of practice and without a sense that the new isn’t less liked.
What has it done for photography?
It’s easy to say that likes have done bad things to photography. But I really don’t know that that’s fair or even necessarily correct.
There are a lot more people making photographs than ever before. And part of the process tends to be learning how other people tried to make images: how many of us spent time to figure out how to make silhouettes? And with the ‘like’ metric you can get a rough guesstimate of whether you’re getting better and better at this kind of classic image. The same is true for lots of other ‘standard’ kinds of images. I think that’s great! People are better photographers on average, today, than ever before. We should celebrate that more often than we tend to.
Where I think that likes can be harmful is that they can stunt photographic growth or exploration. Also, due to how algorithms work, ‘low like’ content might be hidden and thus prevent the artist from receiving feedback on positive areas to improve towards. And, of course, there can be mental health issues when individuals ‘bully’ one another by providing or depriving individuals of likes. All of those aren’t great outcomes.
What would the perfect platform look like?
Utopia and dystopia: both places that don’t exist in reality, and neither of which is a place that you likely ever want to end up in.
All of which is to say, I think there are different characteristics of social media sites and you can dial those characteristics up or down and you create different kinds of sites and experiences. A few ‘dials’:
How ‘chatty’ or conversational is the environment? Does ‘community’ involve direct messages?
How compressed are the images? Is it build for phone screens, tablet screens, monitors, or…?
How effectively are you introduced to/able to discover new photographers?
What is the information density — how much is on the screen at once?
What is/isn’t made public? And how? Do you list numbers of followers, likes, etc?
How much are you appealing to the masses vs dedicated photography enthusiasts?
Monetized by users paying money, or monetizing the users?
Is it a ‘hot’ medium (e.g., sound and video) or a bit ‘colder’ of a medium (e.g., photographs and text)?
How personalized is the experience (i.e., lots of algorithmic engagement vs just find it on your own)?
Is there an assertive and active safety team that blocks certain content from appearing on the site?
When you adjust just some of those dials you affect the nature of the site, the number of users that you need to be revenue neutral, and affect how people will interact with one another. What I think is better will be worse for others, and vice versa.
I actually think that there should, ideally, be a diversity of experiences. And that it’s fine if different little groups form across the Internet that enjoy their parts of the Internet differently. There’s no reason why a half-dozen different photographic social media sites cannot exist, as an example, nor is it really a problem if you aren’t engaging with all of them. Find a site that has the ‘dials’ adjusted to your tastes and you’ll have hopefully found an environment — and user base — that you can enjoy and thrive with.
Tell me about the good bits, the bad bits, and all the bits in between…
I’m sure that I could go on in more depth but won’t drag on. Suffice to say that I think — hell, I know based on my professional experiences — that social media can be powerful and important and enable lots of good things in the world. But, at the same time, it can foster anti-social behaviours, be used to fuel genocide, and just be a depressive hellscape.
This isn’t to say that technology is neutral, however: all technologies as they are designed have particular affordances. Those affordances are linked to how those dials are turned. And there are certainly some ways of turning the dials that are not particularly good for humans, even if we enjoy those sites like sugary food, and other ways that are better, which are more like a banana or apple or something that has a modicum of healthiness.
We shouldn’t demand that everything is digitally healthy — we should be able to enjoy cheeseburgers and poutine now and again!! — but the totality of our dining establishments shouldn’t be fast food and deep fried food. Because we know that it’s really not good for us.
Though all those earlier blogs have long since been scrubbed from the Internet and archived in a place no-one can find in storage. Which is a relief as no-one needs to be reminded of what I was like online in the early 2000s! ↩︎
For the past many months I’ve had the joy of working with, and learning from, a truly terrific set of colleagues. One of the files we’ve handled has been around law reform in Ontario and specifically Bill 194, the Strengthening Cyber Security and Building Trust in the Public Sector Act.
A couple years ago I posted what I wanted for WWDC 2022. I figured that I’d go through the past list and cross off the items that have arrived over the past two major updates to iOS.
And then I’m going to sketch out how I’d like to see Apple actually adopt more AI/ML into their operating systems.
Photos
This was a low point in iOS and remains so. I really want Apple to improve the Photos application given how regularly I use it.
The ability to search photos by different cameras and/or focal lengths
The ability to select a point on a photo to set the white point for exposure balancing when editing photos
Better/faster sync across devices
Enable ability to edit geolocation
Enable tags in photos
All of these are basically just aiming to have the iOS Photos app getting brought up to the same standards as Photos on MacOS.
Camera
There is so much potential that’s in the Camera application. I look at this from the perspective of a photographer, while recognizing that Apple has done a lot to really improve the state of things for videographers.
Set burst mode to activate by holding the shutter button; this was how things used to be and I want the option to go back to the way things were!
Advanced metering modes, such as the ability to set center, multi-zone, spot, and expose for highlights!
Set and forget auto-focus points in the frame; not focus lock, but focus zones
Zone focusing
Working (virtual) spirit level!
Maps
I actually like Maps. I use it a lot. But I definitely want things to be much more collaborative and less focused on Yelp data. I really do like the privacy aspects associated with Maps over some competing applications.1
Ability to collaborate on a guide
Option to select who’s restaurant data is running underneath the app (I never will install Yelp which is the current app linked in Maps)
Music
Music is fine on the whole. Still want to have something like multiple libraries, though.
Ability to collaborate on a playlist
Have multiple libraries: I want one ‘primary’ or ‘all albums’ and others with selected albums. I do not want to just make playlists
Reminders
While it’s getting better there’s still some things to do, though apparently the second item may be coming this WWDC which would be pretty great.
Speed up sync across shared reminders; this matters for things like shared grocery shopping!
Integrate reminders’ date/time in calendar, as well as with whom reminders are shared
Messages
These are both covered off!
Emoji reactions
Integration with Giphy!
News
I’ll be honest: I’ve given up on the RSS feed idea and just rely on Reeder. But I use News a lot and so it’d be nice to more fully block publications from coming up.
When I block a publication actually block it instead of giving me the option to see stories from publications I’ve blocked
It’d be great to see News updated so I can add my own RSS feeds
Fitness
The number one issue with Fitness is that I can’t log rest days. I’ve actually started to use Streaks to be more forgiving and stopped worrying so much about maintaining my streaks in Fitness. But it’s absurd that Apple hasn’t integrated this feature that’s widely requested by its user base.
Need ability to have off days; when sick or travelling or something it can be impossible to maintain streaks which is incredibly frustrating if you regularly live a semi-active life
Health
This still isn’t great. There is no good year over year data that you can compare against. I don’t understand why the UI isn’t better and I hope that it gets better soon.
Show long-term data (e.g. year vs year vs year) in a user friendly way; currently this requires third-party apps and should be default and native
And one more thing…
There is a lot of time and attention being paid to how Apple will show off artificial intelligence functionality in forthcoming operating systems. I tend to agree with Joe Rosensteel about what Apple shouldn’t do: no spying AI systems and instead a focus on useful AI-enabled functionalities.
For Photos I want to propose a pretty useful option for people that would leverage some existing iPhone capabilities. Imagine if you could take a photo (or use the measurement application built into Apple’s mobile OSes) to determine how large a photo would fit in a frame along with the aspect ratio and, then, prompted you to select photos for the frame. That selection could either automatically select just photos of the right aspect range or could show what an AI-determined best aspect ratio crop would look like.
If something like this were bundled up in a kickass UI I can see this being phenomenally helpful and solving a real world annoyance for anyone who wants to print photos.
We create far too many digital photos and print far too few. Physical photos are part of building longterm and vibrant memories: Apple should lean into enabling its customers to make these kinds of mementos.
Rather than requesting a route from A to B, Apple Maps sends off multiple requests with multiple identifiers that masks where you’re trying to go. The app also converts your precise location to a less-exact one after 24 hours, and Apple itself doesn’t store any information about where you’ve been or what you’ve been searching for. Plus none of the information that reaches an external server is associated with your Apple ID. Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/google-maps-vs-apple-maps↩︎
About a year or so ago I switched the theme on this blog. It was the first time I was really diving into a more visual front end, with featured images creating a neat visual aesthetic for each post.
It was cool but just didn’t align with how I make material for the web. I’ve been blogging since the late 90s and am very much an elder millennial, and still like some of those older 1 blog styles. So I’ve reverted back to a much more typical blog format that still displays photos acceptably.2
It’s just slightly above a lateral move, but does include some things that I like:
Anyone who accesses the website from the web will see full posts
A decent search option is at the top of the website
It’s hopefully more apparent how multi-level menus ‘work’
I’ve also gone through and cleaned up my tags once more. I did this about a year ago but another pass should make things more consistent. Really, the key value is in recommending related posts over anything else.
Excited Pixels 