Photoni.st

After mentioning this idea of somehow being able to authenticate the source of a photo, I’ve implemented and tested the idea. Here is an update on the project. I added the ability to federate the system using only a DNS dependency. The point is that for those who are very privacy conscious, they can handle their own data and their own server. They can even change the algorithms used to sign the images, as long as they stick to the format and API standard. The system currently relies on local…

Projects change. Photographs move from person to person, from tool to tool. A crime-scene photo passes from the investigator’s camera to a forensic analyst’s workstation to a prosecutor’s presentation software. A heritage digitisation travels from the conservator’s studio through an editor’s desktop to a public archive. At each step someone asks: is this still the original file, or has it been altered? The Chain of Custody library answers that question with cryptography, not blind trust.…

The saying has earned its place through repetition: the best camera is the one you have with you. There’s obvious sense in it, and a significant problem with it. 133 Nationale When I started landscape photography with the kit lens that came with my 350D, a basic 18-55mm in full plastic (28-88mm equivalent), that camera was with me constantly. So was the frustration. The focal length forced compromises I didn’t want: too narrow for a strong foreground, too short for any real compression. Moving…

Gear Acquisition Syndrome operates on a simple mechanism: attributing the limitations in my work to the limitations of my tools. When I look at my photographs and feel dissatisfied, it’s easier to blame the camera than to blame my seeing, my timing, my compositional choices. The camera is external and replaceable. My ability is internal and requires actual work to change. Taking photos in Paris with a TLR The urge to acquire more equipment comes from the gap between where I am and where I’d…

I took this photo a good while back. I was arriving in Paris by train, and a commuter train overtook us (for some reason I was allegedly in the fast one). I took a photo after I was struck by the visuals and the story I could see in the first few cars. I woke up from my contemplation just in time to capture one of the last ones. What interested me from the visual point of view is the reminder of Edward Hopper’s colours and compositions. Windows into people’s lives, fairly toned down colours.…

On paper, photography looks like a bad coping strategy. You take a heavy thing with you out the door, walk around, and come back with the same weight plus some pictures. But it works. Everyone who shoots knows this, and we tend to give the same reasons: it distracts you, it gives you something to do, it gets you out of the house. All true. But all surface. What I think is really happening is more important: photography creates room in your head. Beach near Arisaig, 14th July 2006 11PM Think…

Photographers will tell you a good photograph needs to stand on its own. No explanation, no supporting text; what’s in the frame is what you get. If the image only works when you explain it, the thinking goes, it has already failed. My wife reading a book There’s a problem with this I can’t get around, which is that I can’t see my photographs the way strangers do. Every image comes preloaded with memory: the light that morning, what I was trying to do, the specific difficulty of getting the…

Digital photography gave us something film never had: an instant undo button for our own judgement. See an image on the back of the camera, decide it fails, press delete, and it’s gone. Film made destruction harder; you could bin a print, but the negative sat in its sleeve unless you went out of your way to cut it up. That friction protected work from impulsive decisions. We’ve lost it. My mum at her crafts with a 50s TLR and a badly rinsed film during development I stopped deleting in the…

We’re wired to look for faces. Show someone a photograph with people in it and their eyes go straight to the faces, searching for expression, emotion, identity. This reflex runs deep enough that many photographers treat it as photographic law: people in the frame means visible faces. It doesn’t. Picnic Think about dreams. People appear, play roles, matter to the story, and when you wake you often can’t reconstruct their faces at all. A blur, an amalgam, sometimes nothing. The emotional logic of…

The ongoing challenge in teaching photography to a young person is protecting them from gear culture. Marketing is sophisticated and pervasive. Social media shows photographers with expensive equipment. Friends will get newer, better cameras. The pressure to upgrade is constant. TLR My niece needs to understand from the start that gear is just a tool, and adequate tools are sufficient until your vision genuinely outgrows them. There is a place for the love of hardware, but it isn’t during the…

Over the past few weeks or months, I’ve noticed more and more people in the photography community sharing their zine experiments online. Last week alone both Rick and I published posts about it. Some are elaborate, beautifully printed things. Others are rougher, more personal, made on kitchen tables when the kids are in bed. What they share is the same restless energy, the same feeling that putting images into a physical object changes how you see them. It gave us an idea. Zine Exchange Club…

I recently reviewed my library of posts and it gave me an idea. What began here as a random series of posts about photography turned into something different as I went through them: an argument about the last two centuries of human record-keeping, about what it cost us to have a medium we trusted automatically, and about what the loss of that trust actually means. The photo books I made That argument is now a “book”: The Post-Evidence World: Photography Was Never Just a Witness. I created my…

When you photograph someone and they notice you, something changes in both of you. For them, it’s brief: a moment of self-consciousness, a decision about how to respond, then absorption back into their day. By evening, you’re probably forgotten. For you, that photograph might stay for years. Busted You’ll return to it, edit it, refine it. It might define a project or open a direction you wouldn’t otherwise have found. The person who gave you that fraction of a second, who barely registered you,…

My father died of cancer in November. After the funeral, the paperwork, the strange silence that follows all of that, my doctor was a bit concerned. There had never been a serious illness in my family before, no cancer, no heart attacks, no leukaemia, and then my dad had cancer. So he sent me for a CT scan of my pancreas. My insides There was a second reason too. I officially have diabetes, though I don’t take medication and my HbA1C is well within the normal range. The right diet is the key.…

After the first six weeks, my niece will have foundation: purpose, seeing, basic technical control. Now the teaching moves from building fundamentals to developing her particular vision through structured assignments. Each one has clear communicative goals, and success is measured by whether she achieved what she intended. Rain These assignments will continue for months, probably years, each building specific capabilities. Here are several examples of how the teaching continues beyond the…

There’s a special feeling that comes from holding something you made yourself, something printed or folded or stapled together, knowing it only exists because you willed it into being. I first felt that in a high school hallway, sometime in the late 1980s. Postcard and zine I made and sent to a stranger. The title of the zine is a slogan from May 68’s riots in Paris Someone had been posting anonymous anarchist texts on the public display boards around my school. Dense, serious stuff, earnest to…

Every photograph exists in two phases: the taking and the revisiting. Most photographers never consciously separate them. That’s part of why so many pictures feel flat on second viewing. An evening in Morocco, 2017 I care about the process of making pictures as much as the pictures themselves. If not more. Aperture, shutter speed, how a particular lens renders a scene. I think about composition the way a carpenter thinks about joints: structurally, in terms of what it does to a frame rather…

My niece has spent four weeks photographing on full automatic. She understands what photography is for, she’s developed her eye, she knows how images communicate. Now she’s encountering situations where automatic settings prevent her from achieving what she wants. That’s perfect timing for introducing technical control. Aiming at the Eiffel Tower We won’t teach her everything the camera can do. We’ll teach her three specific controls that close the most important gaps between intention and…

The universe doesn’t care about us. That’s not pessimism; it’s physics. We’re pattern-seeking creatures dropped into a system operating on principles entirely indifferent to human comfort. Entropy increases, complexity spirals, and meaning is something we have to manufacture ourselves because the cosmos isn’t providing it. For a long time I didn’t have a practical way to live with that fact. Photography became one. Haybale and farm equipment Lifting a camera to your eye is an assertion. In a…

Week four combines analysis with continued practice. My niece has been making photographs for three weeks, and she’s developed intuitions about what works and what doesn’t. Now we’ll make those intuitions conscious by looking at strong work and breaking down how it functions. Rape field We’ll dedicate three sessions to this, each one structured the same way: look at photographs together and analyse them, then go make photographs that attempt similar effects. The first session is about light.…

Photography has a self-image problem, and it starts with the word “witness.” The term has circulated in photographic theory long enough to feel like settled truth. Photographers bear witness. They stand at the edge of events, recording what happens with a fidelity that makes them morally adjacent to the thing itself. The word carries gravity, seriousness, a suggestion that the camera is a kind of secular conscience pointed at the world. On closer inspection, it is also dishonest. Alone? A…