Tag: Photography

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Photography Writing

WWDC 2024 What Do I (Still….) Want To See?

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.

  1. 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 ↩︎
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Photography

John & Dufferin, Guelph, 2023

John & Dufferin, Guelph, 2023

I went away on vacation last year to Guelph. It’s an hour or so away from Toronto and also happens to be where I spent a lot of time growing up and where I did some of my university degrees. We tend to visit once or twice a year just to get away from the ‘big’ city and enjoy some of the restaurants, distilleries, breweries, and other features of Guelph. It also provides an opportunity to see friends and family.

I made this image while we went on a long walk out to Guelph Lake; it’s an entirely man-made lake, and there are nice trails that track along rivers that you can take from downtown to get to the lake.

There isn’t anything particularly magical about this image: it doesn’t necessarily speak to a deep history of the city, or anything so substantive. But I liked the texture of the wall that the utility pole was pressed against, and the chaotic way that the utility wires were somewhat tangled together. And it’s for that reason that this was my favourite landscape-type photograph I made in April 2023.

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Photography

Featured Photograph: ‘Urban’ in Glass’ Monthly Category Showcase

Each month Glass has a different featured photographic category. In March, a photograph I took of College Park was amongst the many excellent images that photographers published to the platform throughout the month in the ‘Urban’ category.

A feature of my street photography is to showcase lone humans in busy metropolitan areas. For context, College Park is surrounded by condos and rental apartments, and is located by a major subway stop; I suspect it’s amongst the denser parts of the city. Nevertheless I was able to catch this lone figure and the ever-present pigeons when I was running to a grocery store to get a few things.

I don’t know that I, personally, consider this to be the best image I made in March. But it definitely is very reflective of the types of images I’ve been making and so is representative of a particular body of work that I continue to develop.

For those interested, this was made using a Ricoh GR iiix. I use a custom monochrome jpeg simulation, applied minor edits in Apple Photos, and cropped the image slightly so it is 20 megapixels as displayed.

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Photography Writing

Tecumseth & Niagara, Toronto, 2023

Tecumseth & Niagara, Toronto, 2023

Toronto is a city of destruction and construction: destruction of the previous era’s architecture (and often industrial buildings) and the construction of housing or glass office towers in their stead. This image by Tecumseth & Niagara shows the destruction of an abattoir that was removed to make room for condos, and the buildings in the background are new rentals in Toronto’s Liberty Village. When I landed in Toronto, in Liberty Village over a decade ago, the land those rentals are on were home to a few artist spaces where the big Toronto samba schools practiced and massive parade puppets were made. Nothing has replaced those artist spaces, to the detriment of artists across the city.

Weirdly I have very intimate memories of the abattoir. Toronto hosts an annual sunset-to-sunrise art festival, Nuit Blanche, and a couple interesting art exhibits were hosted at the abattoir over the years, and I have photos of them that I regularly return to re-experience. After the buildings were designated for destruction a number of community vegetable gardens were maintained on the outside lots. It was always a striking place to come and make images, and was a reminder of the Toronto-that-once-was and was yet-to-become.

For many street photographers, we take images and it is decades later that ‘difference’ is registered because many cities take a long time for major changes to become visible. It’s part of why the habits of the population —what people are wearing, holding, or driving — resonate so strongly with viewers; people and culture change while the built environment persists.

Toronto, by way of contrast, is in a moment of hyper-growth and so an attentive and active street photographer can document things today that may literally be different tomorrow. It turns the street photographer, almost by default, into an urban documentarian. And, also, is one of the many reasons why I think that Toronto offers a subset of street photographers a real opportunity to do novel and rapidly impactful work, as compared to those working in cities that aren’t undergoing the same tempo of destruction and re-construction.

Categories
Photography

Print Day!

Bathurst Station, Toronto, 2023
Bay & Queen, Toronto, 2023

A friend identified a series of photos I’ve made over the past year that they wanted to have as prints. The matte prints all came in yesterday, and I was really pleased at how well Annex Photo made them.

Bathurst Station, Toronto, 2023

I hade three prints made, one from my Ricoh GRiiix (uncropped, 10×15), one from my Fuji X100F (cropped to 17MP, 10×15), and one from the telephoto on my iPhone 14Pro (9MP, 8.5×11). When I’ve shown the prints to others they can’t tell which camera made which image, nor do they see any notable quality difference between the prints.

Spadina & Grange, Toronto, 2023

Now all that’s left is to package and mail the prints to their owner!

Categories
Photography

Bathurst & College, Toronto, 2023

Bathurst & College, Toronto, 2023

This is one of the cityscapes I took last year. It resonates with a number of themes that are often present in my photography: icons of Toronto, construction in the city, and the sense of impermanence and isolation associated with the Toronto streetscape.

The absence of humans along one of Toronto’s many core cross streets also spoke to me. It provided me with a sense of humanity-absent, which is narratively aligned with many of the images that I made throughout the depths of the pandemic.

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Photography Quotations

Moments of Thinking and Photography

Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph. Success depends on the extension of one’s culture, on one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind and vivacity.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Categories
Photography

Postcards Project: January 2023

In the late fall of 2022 I decided that I’d turn one of my street photographs into a postcard for each month of 2023. I just received my proofs for 2023 this week and I’m happy with them; the full order will be made in the next week or two.

I also, however, will be posting the preceding year’s images to Excited Pixels. So, this January I’m posting the January 2023 photograph, in February I’ll post the February photograph from February 2023, and so on.

In addition to the street photograph that was made into a postcard I’ll also be publishing my favourite landscape/streetscape from that month. Despite making a reasonable number of landscapes/streetscapes, this will be the first time that I regularly publish some of them.

January 2023: Streetscape

University of Toronto , Toronto, 2023

I made this image of an under-construction part of the University of Toronto in my last few weeks employed with the institution. It is, in many ways, a deeply personal photo that reflected my passage to a new space. The tape and barriers being knocked over was figurative, in the sense that what once was a warning to keep me away was now a path to follow out of frame, and into new experiences and adventures after working with the same employer for almost a decade.

January 2023: Street Photograph

Richmond & Bay, Toronto, 2023

This photo was made January 1, 2023 and it remains one of my favourites. The emotion in the subjects’ face draws me in and the steam and garbage lends this part of the city (home to the country’s largest banks, stock exchange, and other financial and legal institutions) a kind of grittiness that belies its proximity to wealth and power. The photograph, also, speaks of how you can build a story in a frame that might look one way, but which doubles in meaning and context once grounded in the space and time wherein it was made.

I kept coming back to Bay and Richmond throughout the year and was regularly rewarded with rich images. The fluidity of the location, with updates to the built infrastructure in the form of temporary construction scaffolding, and the steam emerging from vents in this party of the city, just made it fun to keep coming back to.

Categories
Aside Photography

2024.1.20

Throughout 2023 I sorted the photographs I made with the intention of choosing one, from each month, to use in a limited run of postcards. All are street photos from around Toronto. I just ordered some proofs and I can’t wait to see them in the next few weeks ahead of doing a full print run!

Categories
Photography Writing

Best Photography-Related Stuff of 2023

Bay & King, Toronto, 2023

There are lots of ‘best of’ lists that are going around. Instead of outlining the best things that I’ve purchased or used over the year I wanted to add a thematic: what was the best ‘photography stuff’ that I used, read, watched, or subscribed to over the course of 2023?

Photography Stuff I Used

Best Technology of 2023

90-95% of the photographs that I made over the year were with the Fuji X100F. It’s a spectacular camera system; I really like how small, light, and versatile it is. I created a set of recipes early summer and really think that I dialled in how to use them and, also, how to apply my very minimal editing process to the images. I’m at the point with this camera that I can use it without looking at a single dial, and I know the location of every setting in the camera that I regularly use.

I do most of my writing on my well-used iPad Pro 11” (2018). It’s a great device that is enough for 99% of my needs.1 However, I have to admit that I’ve long missed owning an iPad Mini because they’re so small and light and portable. I do pretty well all of my reading on the iPad Mini these days. My partner purchased me one this year and I’ve fallen in love with it again. I’m using it everyday for an hour or more, and ultimately I now pull out the iPad Pro 11” just when I need to do longer-form writing.

Finally, though I haven’t had it all that long, I really do enjoy the Leica Q2. I’m still getting used to the 28mm focal length but deeply appreciate how I can now shoot in bad weather and low light.2 The in-camera stabilization is also letting me experiment with novel slow shutter speeds. I remain excited, however, for what it’ll be like to use the camera when I haven’t been in persistent cloud cover!

Best Services I Paid For

I have kept using Glass each and every day. Does it (still) have problems with its AI search? Yes. Does it have the best photographic community I’ve come across? Also yes. You should subscribe if you really love photography and want to contribute to a positive circle of practice. And if you’re watching a lot of photography-related materials on YouTube I cannot recommend a Premium subscription highly enough!

I also am deeply invested in Apple’s services and pay for Apple One. This gives me access to some things that I care about, including a large amount of cloud storage, News, customized email, Apple Music, and Apple TV. I find the current costs to be more than a little offensive–Apple’s decision to raise costs without increasing the benefits of the service was particularly shitty–but I’m deeply invested in Apple’s ecosystem–especially for storing my photographs!–and so will continue to pay Apple’s service tax.

Best Apps

I use lots of apps but the best ones I rely on for photography include:

  • Podcasts App to listen to the different podcasts to which I’ve subscribed.
  • Reeder for staying on top of the different blogs/websites I’m interested in reading.
  • Glass to look at, comment on, and reflect on photographers’ images.
  • Geotags Photos Pro and Geotags Photo Tagger. I’ve set the former app to record my geolocation every 5 minutes when I’m out making images and the latter to then apply geotags to the photographs I keep from an outing.3

Stuff I Read

Best Photography Books

Most of the non-fiction books that I read throughout the year were focused around photography. The two best books which continue to stand out are:

  • Bystander: A History of Street Photography. This book does an amazing job explaining how (and why) street photography has developed over the past 150 years. I cannot express what a terrific resource this is for someone who wants to understand what street photography can be and has been.
  • Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective. This book is important for all photographers who are interested in monochromatic images because it really explains why, and how, Moriyama made his classic images. It reveals why he made his gritty black and white images and, also, why some of the equivalent ‘recipes’ the mimic this kind of image-making may run counter to his whole philosophy of image making.

Stuff I Watched

Best Movies

The best photography-related movies that I watched were all classics. They included Bill Cunningham: New York; Gary Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable; The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith; and Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York. Combined with written history and photo books they helped to (further) reinforce my understanding of how and why street photographers have made images.

Best YouTube Channels

I watch a lot of photography YouTube. The channels I learn the most from include those run by James Popsys, Tatiana Hopper, EYExplore, Alan Schaller, Pauline B, aows, Aperture, and Framelines. My preference is for channels that either provide POV or discuss the rationales for why and how different images are being (or have been) made.4

Stuff I Subscribed To

Best Podcasts

I tend to listen to photography podcasts on the weekend when I go out for my weekly photowalks. The two that I listen to each and every week are The Photowalk and The Extra Mile. It’s gotten to the point that it almost feels like Neale James (the host of the podcasts) is walking along with me while I’m rambling around taking photos.

Aside from those, I’ll often listen to A Small Voice or The Candid Frame. These are interviews with photographers and I regularly learn something new or novel from each of the interviews.

Best Blogs/RSS Feeds

For the past year I’ve trimmed and managed the number of my RSS feeds. I keep loving the work by Craig Mod, Little Big Traveling Camera,5 and Adrianna Tan’. They all do just amazing photoessays and I learn a tremendous amount from each of them in their posts.

Biggest Disappointments

I somehow managed to break the hood that I’d had attached to my Fuji X100F in the fall and decided to get what seemed like a cool square hood to replace it. It was a really, really bad idea: the hood was a pain to screw on so that it wasn’t misaligned and, once it was aligned, was on so tight that it was very hard to remove. I would avoid this particular hood like the plague.

I also bought a Ricoh GR IIIx and while it’s a fantastic camera I just haven’t used it that much. I didn’t take as many images with it as I’d hoped when I was walking to or from work, and really ended up just using it when I needed to go out and take photos in the rain (I kept it safely hidden under my umbrella). Also, the camera periodically just fails to start up and requires me to pull the battery to reset it. Is it a bad camera? Nope, not at all, and I did manage to capture some images I was happy with enough to submit to Ricoh’s photography contest. But it’s not a camera that I’ve really fallen in love with.

Finally, while I use my AirPods Pro all the time I really don’t like them because I cannot get them to stay in my ears unless I purchase third-party foam tips. And I need to keep purchasing new sets of tips because they wear out after a couple of months. Are they good headphones once they stay in my ears? Yes. But the only way to accomplish that is becoming increasingly costly and that’s frustrating.

Conclusion

Anyhow, that’s my list of the ‘best photography-related stuff’ I’ve used in the course of 2023. What was your top stuff of the year?

  1. I really do want to get a new iPad 11” and will do so once they update the screen. I edit pretty well all of my photos on the iPad Pro and an updated screen (and battery…) would be lovely. ↩︎
  2. There is a caveat that I’ve found: the electronic shutter is absolute garbage for shooting at dusk/in the dark with LED lights. And I think the single-use exposure dial on the Fuji X100F is preferable to the configurable dial on the Q2. ↩︎
  3. You can set the app to record your location more regularly but I’ve found this to be a good balance between getting geolocation information and preserving my phone’s battery life. ↩︎
  4. If you watch a lot of YouTube then I recommend that you pay for a YouTube Premium subscription. You’ll cut out the frustrating advertising that otherwise intrudes into the videos. ↩︎
  5. I think that this is perhaps the single best photography blog that I’ve found. I aspire to this level of excellence and regularity of updates! ↩︎