Postcard 041 - Computer Vision
Yes, this is about AI. (I know you’re tired of reading about AI, but please don’t delete this email.)
I haven’t written one of these in a while because (among other reasons) this project started when I switched camera systems and wanted to use it encourage a practice of looking. It felt like using a “real camera” for this (especially a manual focus one) was core to the ethos of what I was doing, and while I probably take 100+ photos with my iPhone each week, I’ve tried hard to exclude them from these postcards.
Lately I’ve been cultivating a different practice of looking, one assisted by AI thanks to an app called Spectre, released by the incredible team behind Halide. Spectre is a “smart long exposure” app with the ability to capture 3, 5, or 9 seconds and combine what it “sees” into (often blurry) images.
I first downloaded Spectre a few years ago, and like many toys, used it a ton for a few weeks and then it faded into the background. I’ve picked it up again lately, in fact around the time I sent Postcard 040 during my solo trip to Whistler.
My current play with the app has been married with a very specific Darkroom preset that I love (and you can use by downloading at that link), resulting in grainy, high contrast black and white images. Given the nature of Spectre and time lapse photography, I’ve had a fun challenge using it in active settings like biking (above) or snowboarding.
My experience led me to write a little about computational photography and somehow have a ton of conversations about it lately (hello Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon).
One conversation that I regularly have is about iPhones versus traditional cameras — what they are each good for, when I like to use them, etc. I think that many people appreciate what their iPhone can capture, but they don’t quite appreciate the degree to which they aren’t using a camera so much as a computer, in that the iPhone is doing a lot of heavy lifting (perhaps too much) to create what it thinks the “best” image is given what it can see.
While I love using both my iPhone and my other cameras, I’ve been sitting a lot with the conclusion from my piece on computational photography:
I share all of this as a provocation, not necessarily about AI, but to encourage more people to ask the question “How can [this thing] push or enhance my practice?” more often.
Happy looking!