Hi all,
A couple themes to today’s post, including talking about the camera on my new Light Phone III and also some ideas about curation that have been rattling around my head.
The camera on the LP3 is a fixed, 28mm equivalent focal length camera. It's not as good the fancy shots you can get from a high end smart phone, but if you compose your shots, take advantage of the lighting, and work within the constraints of what it can do, you can still take some good photos. I think the saying is “the best camera is the one you have with you, as long as the camera isn’t also a full fledged internet browser and a Pandora’s box of internet distractions.” or something like that.
Anyway, I was going through the photos I took over the last three months. Not to be saccharine, but I actually found that my favorite photos were all of my family. I don’t want to bore you with pictures of my wife and kids, so I cut those from the set below, and picked the seven best I thought were worth sharing. I picked them either because I really liked the subject, the compositions, the colors, or some combination of all of the above.
Related, I’ve also been thinking a lot recently about curation. Generating content is getting easier and easier, but taking the time to ensure the content is worthwhile is I think where the real work is. My sense is that in an age of AI content generation, trusted curation is going to become more important. I’ve been thinking about whether content needs to be edited/curated by a human, and whether the fact that a human (or a particular human) was involved is what gives it value, or if we believe that people just do a better job and don’t run algorithmically awry. Could a machine have curated these photos? I’d believe that it could build a filter to pull out aesthetically pleasing photos, but it would never know the stories behind them, which is part of why I picked some of them.
So, without further ado… my seven favorite (non-family) photos from the past quarter.
Best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer