Weekly Diary: A Trade Show Floor, Three Whisky Bottles, and a Porsche 550 Spyder
Twelve frames made the cut this week, which is fewer than I shot and more than I expected. The camera came out on days I…
Lyon Part-Dieu Is a Permanent Construction Site, and That’s the Most Honest Thing About Lyon
Nobody flies to Lyon for Part-Dieu. You come for Vieux Lyon and its Renaissance courtyards, for the basilica sitting on the hill like a wedding…
Fifteen: What the Tabs Left Behind
Another round through the accumulation. No organizing idea, as usual — just what was still open. Two on the memory chain, working the same problem…
Turning AI Drafts into Real Work: Canva Expands Deep Integration with Anthropic’s Claude Design
A familiar friction has been sitting right in the middle of the AI boom—ideas are cheap now, almost too easy, but turning them into something…
Adobe Introduces Firefly AI Assistant, Turning Creative Workflows into Conversations
A shift is taking shape inside Adobe, and it’s less about adding another feature and more about redefining how creative work even begins. The newly…
What the Sunglasses Saw
The obvious read of this frame is a woman at a Pride event showing something on her phone to the man beside her. That is…
What Photoshop’s Generative Fill Gets Right and Wrong
Photoshop’s Generative Fill has settled into something nuanced: genuinely useful in specific workflows, genuinely limited in others.
The Art of the Subtle Edit: When Less Processing Wins
Heavy processing announces itself. The image becomes about the edit rather than the subject. The photographers whose work holds up over time tend to share a different characteristic.
How ControlNet Changed AI Image Generation
Before ControlNet, AI image generation was fundamentally a prompt-to-image process with limited spatial control. ControlNet changed the axis of what was possible.
Capture One vs Lightroom: The Real Differences in 2026
The Capture One versus Lightroom comparison has been relitigated for a decade. The gap has narrowed. The meaningful differences that remain are specific enough to state clearly.
Why Your AI-Generated Images Look Like AI-Generated Images
Most people can identify AI-generated images on sight. The models keep improving, and yet the tell persists. Understanding what is being detected is useful.
How to Add Film Grain That Doesn’t Look Digital
Digital grain added in post looks different from film grain, and most photographers can feel the difference even when they cannot articulate why.
Luminosity Masking Without the Mysticism
Luminosity masking accumulated a mystique disproportionate to its actual complexity. Strip the jargon and what remains is a straightforward idea with powerful applications.
Midjourney vs Flux vs Stable Diffusion: What They’re Actually Good For
Comparing AI image generators as interchangeable products misses the real question: what is each one actually optimized for?
RAW vs JPEG: Why the Debate Isn’t Over and Still Matters
The RAW versus JPEG debate is treated as settled in most photography education. It is not, and flattening it produces photographers who carry the right files without understanding them.
Film Emulation in 2026: Which Tools Are Worth Your Time
Film emulation has been a cottage industry for over a decade. The tools have gotten better. The conversation about them has not kept pace.
How to Build a Color Grade That Holds Across Different Lighting Conditions
A color grade that works on one image is a lucky accident. A color grade that holds across a full shoot in mixed light is a system.
The Problem with AI Image Generation and Photorealism
AI image generation has become extraordinarily capable at producing images that look real. That is not the same thing as photographically real.
What Makes a Lightroom Preset Actually Good
Most presets are designed to look impressive on one specific image in one specific lighting condition. A genuinely good preset does something different.
The Color Science Behind Why Some Cameras Just Look Better
Photographers say certain cameras just look better. The claim is often dismissed as brand loyalty. There is something real underneath it.
A City That Forgot the Sky
This large-scale painting stages a collision between epochs, placing a contemporary metropolis inside the visual logic of a myth that never really left us. At…
From Documentation to Atmosphere: Why Painterly Images Belong in Modern Media
This image begins life as something almost brutally factual: a massive MSC container ship at night, cranes stretched like skeletal ribs against a dark sky,…
24th Annual Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards, Los Angeles, The Beverly Hilton
The ballroom at The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles filled with a familiar mix of nerves, pride, and inside jokes as the Visual Effects Society…
A Row of Quietly Working Machines at a Crowded Tech Expo
The scene feels busy and focused at the same time, one of those trade-show moments where noise and concentration overlap. In the foreground, a long…