Ben Taylor

Importance of Writing

2023-05-16T07:55:00+00:00

A quick thought on a quote that got my attention this week:

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.

This is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, although I think that’s probably a misattribution.

But I do think the sentiment is relevant. For me it’s not even about writing well, for me writing (even badly) forces me to think. At least for me my brain requires regular exercise, that cannot be outsourced.

Everyone is falling over them selves to ‘hack their productivity’ by having the likes of ChatGPT write for them. Where do we draw the line between having these tools make writing easier, and having them make thinking easier?

Photography in Plato’s Cave

2023-02-18T22:50:00+00:00

In On Photography, Susan Sontang describes humankind as “lingering unregenerately in Plato’s Cave”. But that the insatiability of the photographic eye changes the terms of our confinement in the cave.

In many ways Sontang’s book feels more relevant now than ever. Because of the meteoric growth in photographic technology and, in wealthy countries, near universal ownership of image making devices it’s critical we understand the power and importance of the photograph.

Recent advancements in technology have caused us to ask questions about the nature and value of image making, how we see the world, and even our nature itself. I believe it’s important that we address these questions head on, or else risk being trapped forever in an ever-shrinking cave staring out at shadows of a world we don’t care to understand.

I’ve been quite a serious hobbyist photographer for over 20 years. I’d consider myself a reasonably competent photographer, I can approach most situations with confidence.

I’ve come to know a lot about light, lenses, colour, and tone. I operate a carefully colour-managed workflow, producing prints to a high standard. I know the appropriate paper to use to suit my subject. I understand how light interacts with my sensor and my lens. I’m a halfway competent drone pilot and can make images from the air. In the darkroom I can tell you just how a photon interacting with a silver halide crystal creates a latent image, and what the size and shape of those crystals means for the warmth of the print. I can present and protect my images so that they should last for generations.

And every single bit of all of that is pointless.

Even before we look at new technologies it becomes important to ask, what’s the point? Once you’ve reached passable technical mastery, what’s the point? What’s the point of standing with my camera in the tripod holes of photographers who’ve gone before me? Lovely though it is to create another beautiful mountain top sunrise, and lovely though the print will look on my wall, how is it different to the identically similar image created by someone else yesterday?

Recent advances in generative AI, such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E mean we don’t even need to have experienced what we want to photograph. These technologies can capture what we’re imagining. Just describe the photograph you have in mind, and you have the image.

For example, here’s an image I made a few years ago. This is a picture of the sunrise at Mam Tor in the Peak District. I had to get up at 4am and take a short hike to be at this spot in time. It’s not an amazing image, but it makes a pretty print.

This image is by no means unique. Indeed, my tripod was firmly planted in the holes made by photographers before me, many producing far superior versions of the same image. A quick Google image search results in this:

Photographs are experience captured. I love my Mam Tor image. Not because it’s a great photograph, it isn’t, but because it reminds me of the experience of being on that hilltop at that moment. What does my image say, what does it add to expand or alter the terms of our confinement in Plato’s Cave?

It’s hard to see that it says much more than “I was here, at this time”. But I don’t need a photograph to do that. I can go and experience the sun rise, unencumbered by photographic equipment and the need to think about image capture. Then, when I get back, I can simply ask DALL-E to generate:

“A vivid, high quality, HDR photograph of sunrise over Mam Tor. There is a path running away from the viewer up over the ridge. A small wooden fence runs along the grass to the distance.”

Which gives me:

With technology like this that seeks to utterly devalue and remove the photographer from the art of image making we may well ask ourselves why bother?

Generative AI of all kinds can on one hand be seen as the ultimate expression of capitalism. We’ve long since past the point of art as commodity, so it’s perhaps only natural that we now find ourselves with the artist themselves being a person in the middle to be removed. We should not be surprised at technology that seeks to replicate and industrialise the means of production of a valuable commodity.

And yet this technology relies on humans. I saw someone recently describe sharing a great image you’ve made with DALL-E as “like sharing a Google search you’re particularly proud of”. All generative AI relies on unimaginably large sets of training data. As we’ve put more and more of our creative output online, so it’s been used to feed the machine.

Putting the very real issues of copyright and attribution aside, I believe that if we come to ascribe real value to images generated in this manner we face an urgent and existential cultural crisis.

All machine learning is by its nature conservative. It is only able to consider what has gone before. DALL-E could only make that image because of the many millions of photographers whose work OpenAI have appropriated. It does not experience the world, and despite appearance it does not create anything new. It’s a magic trick, they do it with mirrors.

So much of the breathless commentary surrounding these new technologies falls for the mistake of equating software with sentience. Humans are prone to seeing patterns in things and mistaking it for personality. The conjurer has held up a huge mirror, and we’ve failed to see ourselves in it. And this is dangerous, because when we tell ourselves these things are somehow “other” we start to ascribe a value to what they create that exceeds the value we place on its inputs.

I’ve been talking about models like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E that create images, but the same applies to large language models like GTP-3. These models capture and regurgitate our culture, but they cannot be allowed to become our culture. If they do, if we come to value what they create, our culture is doomed to stagnate. This point, right now, today, is as far as humanity can come and we can go no further.

By valuing the output of these models, we are saying to ourselves we are happy to continue “lingering unregenerately in Plato’s Cave”. The images these models create are not even shadows on the wall in the cave. They are just the outlines of the shadows we’ve seen before.

Where photography has the power to alter the terms of our confinement in the cave by seeking to enlarge our notion of what’s worth looking at, generative AI seeks to narrow our confinement and limit us.

This is why we should bother. We must continue to create photographs as experience captured. Dorothea Lange said, “a camera is a device for learning how to see without a camera”. If we give up our image making to a model trained on the past, we will stop learning how to see.

Every time we press the shutter and make an exposure we’re doing so for a reason. We are capturing some new essence of our experience. Regardless of whether it’s an unthinking snapshot, or a slow considered piece, every exposure ever made that was made by a human was made with human intention. Susan Sontag describes the camera as the “ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood”. Let’s let our consciousness be acquisitive, let’s capture new things. The decisive moment is not just capturing that elusive perfect moment of exposure, it’s capturing the experience and intent of the photographer.

Photography does redefine the terms of our confinement in Plato’s Cave, but only when it’s created by a human, when it shows us something new, as an expression of human experience.

Canoe Building Part 3

2023-01-23T21:00:00+00:00

The next step is making the inside and outside stems. It took me a little while to twig how this goes together, it not explicit in the book. The inside stem provides a point for the cedar strips that will form the hull to attach to. The outside stem will go on top once the stripping is done and finish it off.

My inside stems are white ceder, the outside stems are ash. I chose ceder for the inside as I’m going to need to shape them to provide a beveled edge for the strips to attach to. Ceder will be easier to work than Ash. The inside and outside stems are steam bent together so they’ll fit together perfectly later on.

Because it’s a big bend both the ash and ceder need to be steamed before bending, this is the only part of the project that needs steam. I’ve never done this before and was quite apprehensive about ruining the nice (and expensive!) ash I got. The book warns that you only have 45 seconds to complete the job before the wood cools down too much. A test when setting up showed me that the ash would quickly snap and not bend if too cool.

In the end though it went very well. It was very satisfying to feel the wood willingly bend to shape around my mould, and 45 seconds was plenty to time to get the shape right.

Steaming was done in my high tech wood steaming apparatus. This consists of on old kettle with the thermostat taken out, a bit of drain pipe, and some rags. The book says to add the wood when the pipe gets hot. However I found that the pipe softens under the heat and collapses, so better to add the wood at the start to keep it all together. After around 15 minutes the kettle was almost boiled dry, so I took the wood out and it was ready.

I don’t have enough clamps to make stems for both ends at the same time (they have to sit on the mould for a day or so to dry). I have a feeling I’m going to need to buy many more clamps before this project is finished.

My stems are laminates of three pieces of wood each. The next step will be to mix up some epoxy to fix the laminates together.

Canoe Building Part 2

2023-01-02T22:00:00+00:00

I hit an interesting point in construction of my canoe over the weekend. I’ve now got all the forms that the hull will be constructed around made and attached in place on the strongback.

The book mentions the last steps of positioning and attaching the forms as being especially satisfying, and it’s quite right. As you’re carefully aligning and positing each station the shape of the boat gradually emerges.

Making the forms took me some time. I don’t have a band saw, so I had to cut each one individually with a jigsaw. I was a little worried about how accurately I’d be able to do this, but by cutting carefully just outside the line and then shaving down I was able to be quite precise.

With a band saw you can cut two matching forms at once, but because I had to cut each peace individually I also had to mark each one out. By the end my plans we getting a little tatty and my carbon paper was running out. But they just about survived enough to do the job.

Next up is making the stems, which will be made of ash. This will need steaming before bending and clamping around the stem moulds. Exciting adventures with a second hand kettle await…

Canoe Building Part 1

2022-12-04T22:12:00+00:00

I’ve always quite fancied building a canoe. Some time ago, after having spent a little time reading about it and perhaps a little too long in the pub, I made what may well turn out to be an unwise comment. I might have said that building a canoe looked reasonably easy. Because I’m always on the look out for more chainsaws to juggle I’ve decided give to it a go. Having never attempted anything like this before, I though it could be good to document progress as I go on here.

So, I’m building a 15 foot ceder strip canoe. This will be a winter / spring project that I expect to take around six month to complete, given the time I have available to commit to it. I’m working mostly from the canoe building bible, Canoecraft, by Ted Moores. This really is an excellent book. Everyone says it’s the book to get if you’re setting out to build a canoe, and they’re right.

This weekend I constructed the strong back. This is a long, low, table which will hold the forms around which the hull will be constructed. The book gives excellent guidance on construction which helped it all go together smoothly.

It’s important that the strong back is, well, strong. But it’s also critical that it’s absolutely level. I don’t have the ability in my little work shop to make long cuts that are absolutely straight. So I had my big sheets of particle board ripped for me into 10 inch planks at the shop. I could then cut them to size, and make the gables, with my circular saw. This meant it was easy enough to get the finished thing properly level.

It’s now leveled and in place, ready for me to make the forms and mount them on top.

Stop Spotlight Indexing External Drives

2022-02-20T09:33:00+00:00

I use an external RAID device on my Mac. I’m constantly frustrated that when it’s connected and I go to use Spotlight I have to wait for it to spin up before Spotlight gives me a result.

Spotlight is useful for quickly searching for files, but also doing quick calculations etc. Say I need to know what $100 is in Sterling, I can just hit command-space and type $100 and it’ll tell me right away. Waiting several seconds while my RAID spins up kills Spotlight’s immediacy which is its key function.

Luckily though it’s simple enough to tell Spotlight to disable indexing for any mounted volume you chose. If you have the same problem pop open a terminal and do the following:

$ mdutil -s /Volumes/<VolumeName>

Indexing enabled. 

> sudo mdutil -i off -d /Volumes/<VolumeName>

Indexing disabled.

> mdutil -s /Volumes/<VolumeName>

Indexing disabled.

Note that clearly this will mean Spotlight is no longer indexing the volume. That means you’ll not see results from that volume in your Spotlight search results (which is the desired outcome for me).

A Letter to Chloe Smith

2022-01-29T09:02:00+00:00

// cc: chloe@chloesmith.org.uk

Hello,

The attached photo motivated me to write to you. This is a picture of my youngest daughter’s schoolwork she did on the 19th of June 2020. I took this photo to send to her teacher so she could feel some small connection with the outside world.

At that time, she was doing her schoolwork from a tiny space we cleared for her in the cupboard under the stairs. I was working to keep my business running while struggling with home-schooling. We were all doing what we could to protect our physical and mental health.

These are tiny things compared to the huge sacrifices made by others at that time. However, this image served as a reminder for me of a difficult time that will leave scars for years to come. Lockdowns were punishing for so many people in so many ways.

Despite that under the same circumstances I would do it again. It was the right thing to do.

This is why it’s so hard to read stories of drinking and partying in government buildings at that time. It is not just the likelihood that the Prime minister misled us, it’s the culture within your government that allowed those things to happen that hurts.

At some point a final reckoning on this whole sorry story will come. I have a single request for you. Will you please do something I don’t feel you’ve ever done before and represent me?

Ben.

AI Writing Sales Emails

2022-01-20T14:09:00+00:00

I got this email today:

Hi Ben — We hope you’re well, and having a good start to new year, and the Q1 quarter. I’m inviting people who share similar backgrounds to an exclusive session below.

I’m impressed that Rainbird Technologies values artificial intelligence. I was reading news that experts have found that dogs are an effective way to protect against home security threats. Security Forward’s new report discusses this in-depth, and it has some dire results for those who choose not to use dogs as their primary security measure. I enjoyed reading it, and hope to share more.

I’m Chris, CEO, at Flowize. We recently invited a number of companies similar to yours to accept our invitation for an exclusive session (attached deck here) to learn more about how we’ve helped them. We hope you’ll accept our invitation to join us.

Have a great rest of your week!

Like many people the email address I use for work has become functionally unusable because of emails like this. The volume of unsolicited email made to look personal to avoid spam filters drowns out ‘real’ email.

This one though especially caught my attention. Dogs? Home Security? Then I noticed in the footer:

You can respond ‘STOP’ to opt-out of this company. Kalendar AI has written the content in this email for our customers. If you see any errors in the content generation, please report them by responding to this email to us with your kind, big heart

My heart is not nearly kind or big enough to help this company spam me more effectively. The “personal” part of this email is clearly written using GTP-3 or some similar language model. Perhaps I’m just being overly grumpy, but if my attention is worth so little to you then your email is no more than noise.

My LRPS Panel

2021-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

I’m very pleased to have successfully achieved my Licentiate distinction from the Royal Photographic Society. When I set out to work towards this I found it very useful seeing other people’s successful panels. So above is my successful panel. I presented these as a set of ten mounted, roughly A3 size prints, on Hahnemüehle FineArt Perl paper.

The LRPS distinction is about demonstrating a range of photographic skill while meeting criteria in; camera work and technical quality, visual awareness, communication, and the overall impression. It was a challenge to present a panel of ten prints that meet these criteria and shows different approaches while still being a single, balanced, and (hopefully!) cohesive body of work.

I’m happy with my final panel, which I think comes to gether well. I could not have done it without the support of the RPS thorough advisory days and 1-1 portfolio review.

I was worried about a couple of these images, especially the cental bird image. There is a reputation that the assessors hate things like blown highlights with no texture, which is obviously very evident on the leading edge of the bird’s wing. Luckily this reputation is unfounded, and they agreed with me that the highlight adds to the structure and shape of the wing.

If you’re thinking of going for the LRPS I’d absolutely recommend booking on those 1-1 sessions, it gave me the confidence to go for it and include images like the bird and helped me see where my panel needed more work.

The individual images that make up my panel are below (click to see larger versions).

Don’t worry about Straight Out of Camera, worry about Straight Out of Mind

2021-02-07T20:49:00+00:00

This might not be wise. I’m going to enter a very old and slightly controversial debate. The question boils down to:

“Is it dishonest to post process your photographs?”

This kind of question has always hung around photography, although it seems to be being asked more frequently as technology increasingly makes it possible to do astounding things in post.

When I used to shoot film there was (and I suspect there still is) a vogue for making prints that show the film edges to prove it’d not been cropped. In digital there’s a growing vouge for images posted online with the tag “Straight Out of Camera (SOC)” to indicate that the image has not been edited manually in software outside of the camera.

The problem is that, regardless of if you’re shooting analog or digital, there is no such thing as an unedited image.

The Camera Always Lies

When you make a photograph you’re recording data about the scene. In digital it’s data captured by your camera’s sensor. To turn that data into something you can see some software needs to process it. That means making decisions about how the data should be rendered, including things like colour, white balance etc. If you shoot RAW some (but not all) of those decisions are left to you, but you still have make them to see the image. If you shoot JPG the camera makes most of these decision for you.

What’s more, before you make a single decision the camera’s software is interpreting the data it’s recording. These are non-trivial things too. This process can totally alter an image. This is why the colours from an Olympus camera ‘feel’ different to a Cannon. Everything in photography is a decision, right down to who makes your sensor.

This has always been the case. In analog photography it’s not data recorded by a sensor, it’s a latent image recorded in energised silver halides. Your choice of film matters. Do you use FP4 for a smooth portrait look, of HP5 for a gritty feel? Do you use a developer that will give a high contrast, or something that will maintain the full tonal range. It goes on and on.

The point is that there’s no such thing as Straight Out of Camera. Every image you see, no matter where it comes from, has been processed. When you hear “I don’t like like to process my images”, it really means “I like the processing that’s done for me automatically my by camera”.

I suspect the sentiment is not about this though. It’s really a question of “are we presenting our images honestly by post processing?”

There’s so much that can be done in post. Complete sky replacement, cloning out unwanted distractions, artificial focusing, selective colouring, the list seems to go on and on. All this means it’s possible to create images that bear very little resemblance to the data captured at the moment of exposure.

It’s worth noting that much of this capability isn’t new. Digital sky replacement, for instance, is understandably cause for much comment. But it’s not new, packs of negatives for use as replacement skies have been available for many decades, and have long been cause for similar comment. Sky replacement isn’t for me, but then I’m not making digital composites. That not my medium as much as watercolours or oil paints aren’t.

For me the key to answering the question lies in your own vision. In his seminal series of books, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print, Ansel Adams talks about the art and skill of pre-visualisation. This involves having mastery over the materials and equipment you use in your image making.

The principle is that by developing sufficient mastery of your process when you take your photo you know very exactly what the final print will look like and what must be done to produce it. Image making like this is a deliberate act. This is true regardless of if you’re making considered landscapes that take days of planning, or if you’re capturing the decisive moment in a street scene. With proper skill and pre-visualisation you are able to execute your vision from the moment of exposure through to whatever medium your final image will be presented in.

The Ansel Adams ideas of pre-visualisation apply just as much to digital process as they did to analog ones. It’s still just as critical to know how you’re going to process an image to execute your vision. Perhaps you want to lose detail in the shadows for that sun set where everything felt dark behind a glowing sky, maybe that street scene needs a harder contrast to convey a feeling of anxiety, or the still life you’re making will be rendered perfectly on a slightly textured paper.

Much of the art of photography is making myriad decisions, and much of the skill lies in understanding how those decisions interact to generate the end result even before the exposure is made.

If we don’t make these decision ourselves, and instead rely on technology to make them for us we are not executing our vision. It’s not “Straight our of Camera” that matters, that’s means relying on a camera’s processing to bring a vision to life. What matters is the vision you have in your head when you make your exposure. What matters is “Straight out of Mind” images.

Is it dishonest to post process images? No. Very often it’s dishonest not to.