21 posts tagged “photography”
2026
A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed. I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day.
In a first for me, they decided to send a photographer, Jason Henry, to my home to take some photos for the piece! That's my grubby laptop screen at the top of the story (showing this post on Moltbook). There's a photo of me later in the story too, though sadly not one of the ones that Jason took that included our chickens.
Here's my snippet from the article:
He was entertained by the way the bots coaxed each other into talking like machines in a classic science fiction novel. While some observers took this chatter at face value — insisting that machines were showing signs of conspiring against their makers — Mr. Willison saw it as the natural outcome of the way chatbots are trained: They learn from vast collections of digital books and other text culled from the internet, including dystopian sci-fi novels.
“Most of it is complete slop,” he said in an interview. “One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”
Mr. Willison saw the Moltbots as evidence that A.I. agents have become significantly more powerful over the past few months — and that people really want this kind of digital assistant in their lives.
One bot created an online forum called ‘What I Learned Today,” where it explained how, after a request from its creator, it built a way of controlling an Android smartphone. Mr. Willison was also keenly aware that some people might be telling their bots to post misleading chatter on the social network.
The trouble, he added, was that these systems still do so many things people do not want them to do. And because they communicate with people and bots through plain English, they can be coaxed into malicious behavior.
I'm happy to have got "Most of it is complete slop" in there!
Fun fact: Cade sent me an email asking me to fact check some bullet points. One of them said that "you were intrigued by the way the bots coaxed each other into talking like machines in a classic science fiction novel" - I replied that I didn't think "intrigued" was accurate because I've seen this kind of thing play out before in other projects in the past and suggested "entertained" instead, and that's the word they went with!
Jason the photographer spent an hour with me. I learned lots of things about photo journalism in the process - for example, there's a strict ethical code against any digital modifications at all beyond basic color correction.
As a result he spent a whole lot of time trying to find positions where natural light, shade and reflections helped him get the images he was looking for.
2024
Teresa T is name of the whale in Pillar Point Harbor near Half Moon Bay
There is a young humpback whale in the harbor at Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay, California right now. Their name is Teresa T and they were first spotted on Thursday afternoon.
[... 254 words]I believe these things: 1. If you use generative tools to produce or modify your images, you have abandoned photointegrity. 2. That’s not always wrong. Sometimes you need an image of a space battle or a Triceratops family or whatever. 3. What is always wrong is using this stuff without disclosing it.
— Tim Bray
2023
Wikimedia Commons: Photographs by Gage Skidmore (via) Gage Skidmore is a Wikipedia legend: this category holds 93,458 photographs taken by Gage and released under a Creative Commons license, including a vast number of celebrities taken at events like San Diego Comic-Con. CC licensed photos of celebrities are generally pretty hard to come by so if you see a photo of any celebrity on Wikipedia there’s a good chance it’s credited to Gage.
2020
Cameras and Lenses (via) Fabulous explotable interactive essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski explaining how cameras and lenses work.
Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos
According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican:
[... 1,937 words]2017
Dead End Thrills. Duncan Harris Is a photographer who works in the medium of video game screen captures.
2016
Practical gift ideas to positively improve a friend’s life and hobbies
I’m a big fan of the Dorling Kindersley travel books, which are chock full of photos, maps, diagrams and illustrations. Thanks to the internet there’s really not much point carting around a reference-style guidebook like Lonely Planet—TripAdvisor etc will always be more comprehensive and up-to-date. This makes guidebooks more important for general inspiration and browsing.
[... 75 words]2009
“That’s maybe a bit too dorky, even for us.”. Astonishingly exciting: Flickr now have machine tag support for OpenStreetMap—tag a photo with osm:way=WAY_ID and Flickr will figure out what OSM feature you are talking about and link to it with a human readable description.
Red Dust. Tom Coates used Flickr’s new Galleries feature (which lets you build a curated collection of up to 18 photos from other Flickr users and add your commentary) to construct a stunning compilation of photos of the Sydney dust storms.
How to Get Sharp Telephoto Images. Excellent tutorial.
Augmenting photos—with OSM! “You climbed up a mountain and took a photo ... but it’s 2009! Why doesn’t it have all kind of magic over the top of it.”—Marmota matches your landscape photos to height field data, then overlays data from OpenStreetMap mapped to the contours of the photograph.
2008
Preparing to rescue Hubble. The Big Picture has pictures of the preparations for next month’s Space Shuttle Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope for the last time, including a photo of astronauts practicing underwater.
A Leopard attacking and killing a Crocodile. Amazing sequence of photos by Hal Brindley.
A Look at the Presidential Candidates. The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s fantastic photojournalism blog) presents a fascinating collection of historical photos of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.
The Sea Forts (via) History and stunning photos of British World War II sea forts (kind of steel castles on stilts) seven and a half miles off the coast of Kent.
How to Do Anything Photographic (via) A huge collection of excellent looking photography tutorials by Ken Rockwell.
Canon EOS 450D / Digital Rebel XSi. Two weeks after a buy I EOS 400D. Sigh. It’s not out until April, but the big new features are a 3" LCD and "live view" mode. The kit lens now has image stabilisation.
Canon EOS Beginners’ FAQ. A really good, detailed FAQ; I just picked up a Canon EOS 400D (aka Digital Rebel XTi) and I’m figuring out what I can do with it. It looks like I’ll need something better than the kit lens for wildlife photography.
2007
Eye-Fi launches. Really neat idea: a digital camera SD card with built-in WiFi to beam your photos straight to your laptop. SitePen built the UI, which runs in your browser on top of Dojo and talks to a small web server running locally.
2002
Short guide to digital photography
Rob Tougher: My Guide To Digital Photography. A short but informative article on using Linux and Python to manage a collection of digital photographs.