Accidentally in Code

Tag: photos

  • 2021 in Photos

    2021 in Photos

    Since 2017, I’ve been posting a photo every day to Instagram and photo.cate.blog. I kept that up last year, posting 361 photos in total.

    In 2021, the aesthetic monotony of pandemic life really started to get to me and this was probably the hardest this project has ever felt. I think part of the appeal of the intense amount of crafting I did was to have something new to photograph at the end of each project. I found myself continually digging through my photo roll to find something – anything – to post, and multiple times I found myself about to post a picture I had already posted before.

    That being said, I’m glad I kept at it. It is a nice and minimal time commitment habit, and I hope when life becomes more “normal” it will feel easier, again, and I’ll be glad I stuck with it.

  • 2020 in Photos

    2020 in Photos

    Since 2017, I’ve been posting a photo every day to Instagram and photo.cate.blog. I kept that up last year, posting 363 photos in total. In 2020 most challenging was the monotony of long periods of lockdown, but I’m glad I kept at it.

    In 2019’s recap post I wrote, “when writing has felt impossible, it’s nice to keep up some form of expression consistently”, which still feels very true. Pandemic life has been so boring at times, sometimes I’ve felt like I had nothing of interest to say or write, but (almost) every day, I have found an image worth sharing, and that feels like something to celebrate.

  • 2019 in Photos

    2019 in Photos

    In 2019, continuing on from 2017 and 2018, I continued to post a photo every day mirrored between photo.cate.blog and instagram (364 in total apparently, I must have missed one day).

    This year I experimented with more abstract things, text and positioning, and made heavy use of some new film style filters. I also posted a lot of photos of my house, and particularly the fresh flowers that I’ve been getting more and more creative with.

    Some days posting a picture feels like a chore, but mostly it is a nice way to share some snippet of my world. The tagline of my photo blog is 1000 words a day, and when writing has felt impossible, it’s nice to keep up some form of expression consistently. The entire project – three years of daily photographs – feels now like a particular, heavily curated, time-agnostic, angle on my life. Personal, and yet abstract, because I never post pictures of myself. It is purely about how I see the world, and never about how I am seen.

    As a rule, I give myself space at the end of each year to contemplate killing every project. However Jan 1, I carefully arranged this photo without thinking about the possibility not to. Perhaps after three years it’s no longer a project, but rather a habit – and one to continue in 2020.

  • 2018 in Photos

    2018 in Photos

    For 2018 I continued my quest to post a photo a day, mirrored between photo.cate.blog and instagram. Last year my top photos had a tropical tint, this year raccoons are the stars.

    I didn’t have a focus as much this year; like many things, it was much more about the act of showing up. I turned more often – I think – to the past, revisiting and reprocessing photos from another time.

    There’s more art, I think, and more small things made bigger, that might otherwise go unnoticed. There are a lot of pictures of the Cork, almost always the river – I love water, and I’m interested in reflections and asymmetry. Snippets of domesticity. More text, and I think more darkness, too. Some capture a state, some a place, others a mood. By and large the photos of 2018 are less processed, and I think I played a little more with perspective.

    By this point the daily photo is not so much a project but a habit. It’s one I’m grateful for, even on days that it feels like one more thing to do. I’m looking forward to looking back at the photos that stood out in 2019.

  • 2017 in Photos

    2017 in Photos

    catehstn-best9.jpg
    Best nine

    In an attempt to get better at photography, this year I started photo.cate.blog and shared a photo a day to it (the total was 366… so I guess I shared one extra but I’m not sure when). I also shared these photos on Instagram. I wasn’t a huge fan of Instagram at first and was irritated when it spammed all my Facebook “friends”, but 1) I’ve found a number of raccoons (and otters!) to follow on there and 2) a lot of my friends use it, and it’s nice to see their happy moments.

    Depending on the day I tended to either:

    • Take a photo of something in the moment – even on a relatively boring day.
    • Choose a recent photo and edit it.
    • Pick a picture relatively randomly and force myself to make it interesting. I got creative with filters, cropping etc.

    None of the photos are selfies (well – except for two of my feet). Much as I love the selfie as a genre, this wasn’t a project to collect a bunch of photos of myself, but rather a project to collect a years worth of glimpses of the world as I see it.

    It’s been nice to build up a library of processed photos, and edit things more than I would when just capturing a snapshot on Twitter. I think it’s made me better at both taking photos and editing them – I learned that I take basically every image 0.6 degrees off, for example. It also gave me a reason to use the WordPress apps every day. We’ve been working hard on making the media experience better, and I’ve seen my experience get better as the time has passed.

    Here’s to more – and better – photos in 2018!

  • What Does a Good Media Experience Look Like?

    What Does a Good Media Experience Look Like?

    One of the things I wanted to do more of this year is explore photography. Sometimes I worry that creating a photo editing app and writing a book chapter about creating image filters sucked some of the joy from photography for me. I wanted to do more with my pictures for their own sake, rather than just because I was trying to feed a Tumblr. I also find that I post pictures in the moment (on Twitter), or not at all. There are well over 7K photos on my iPhone – I’m sure many of them are worth revisiting.

    Part of the reason for this is that uploading photos to my blog became more painful when iPhoto became Photos, and now my workflow involves right clicking to get the filename and then searching for the picture in Finder. I used to create really image heavy posts, like the ones from North Korea, but at some point I stopped. I shared pictures on Twitter, or not at all. I didn’t keep my Flickr stream updated. I took lots of photos, and then just… kept them synced between device and computer.

    So, I decided to play more with media this year. I downloaded an app with all these filters (and actually paid for it!) and I’m playing with it and with more intensely filtered images (including super fake ones, like the one above [original]). I also set up photo.cate.blog which I think of as my “mobile only” blog. I did the most basic site creation on my laptop (Pressable + Jetpack + Feedburner) and now I am restricting myself to mobile devices to change it. I’ve been alternating posting from my Pixel and my iPhone. I tend to take more photos on my iPhone, so there I have a rich set to choose from. Pixel photos are more in the moment and encourages me to try and find something worth capturing even on a more “boring” day.

    I also started using (urgh) Instagram. I haven’t logged into it on my computer – there’s been no need to. But I did run into a couple of things: Create an account with Facebook didn’t work on Android (did on iOS), and their onboarding tutorial wasn’t updated when they changed the UI. I’m posting the same photos to Instagram as I post to photo.cate.blog. Instagram did a pretty thorough job of spamming all my friends and now I feel obliged to keep using it, even though I can’t do what I want to on it (automate posting from photo.cate.blog, because of their TOS). I don’t think anyone knew about photo.cate.blog, because I didn’t connect it to social media or tell anyone about it. I wanted to see if I could stick with it for a month first.

    One of the things this made me realize is that I have a set of expectations around media, and I’ve been thinking about what those are.

    Media is a feature where:

    • I expect a better experience on mobile than on the desktop – Apple and Google photos are both better on mobile and easier to integrate into apps than desktop web.
    • It suits the capabilities of the phone – it’s easier to take a picture and add a caption on the phone. It’s easier to write long form on a computer. A tablet is somewhere in between for both (although I often see people using tablets as cameras when I’m exploring).
    • Photo and mobile are synonymous. The iPhone has been one of the most popular cameras on Flickr for years. Newer Android devices also have amazing cameras – the Pixel has a great camera, I really like it.

    What Does a “Good” Media Experience Look Like?

    • It’s easy to upload multiple images from device.
    • I can add media from my existing media (on that platform) easily.
    • I can create galleries of images.
    • If there’s a limit on how many images I can upload at once, that’s clear.
    • I can see what I’m uploading before I upload it.
    • The app handles intermittent network access and retries are easy.
    • Uploading images doesn’t block me from doing other activities.
    • It’s easy to add captions, a11y labels etc.
    • It remembers my preferences.

    What Does a “Great” Media Experience Look Like?

    • I can choose which image is featured (when that item is shared elsewhere, e.g. on Twitter).
    • It’s easy to upload images from anywhere (the camera roll, other apps, the web, URLs).
    • I can upload as many images as I want.
    • I can do some editing of my images: crop, filter etc.
      • If I edit them, edits happen before upload so my device remains a source of truth (or it’s made easy to save locally).
    • I can upload images in the background.
    • It’s easy to keep my place in my photo roll.
    • I can search by location or time.

    I’m curious about other people’s experiences here – what’s your favourite app for sharing images? What do you love about it?

  • Show & Hide: Free on the iOS App Store

    Show & Hide: Free on the iOS App Store

    I released Show & Hide nearly a year ago now and it’s now free on the app store.

    It’s not set the world alight, and I haven’t made the progress I wanted to on releasing the Android version (still in beta), but it’s got a few nice comments, and I’ve seen some beautiful photos. Here’s one of my favourites – taken in NYC at the end of September.

    img_6301

    If you try it, I’d love to see the pictures you take. Tweet them and mention @ShowAndHide or @catehstn.

     

  • Launching: Show & Hide

    Launching: Show & Hide

    I launched a thing.

    You can buy it for your iThing.

    Please upvote it on ProductHunt.

    What is the thing? It’s an image processing app. It allows you to make cool, partially colored images. It’s called Show & Hide.

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    The longer and more personal story is: this has been a long term side project for me, and has been part of my life for the last ~2.5 years. It started as wanting to visualize a photo series, and as part of that I wrote an algorithm to detect the dominant color in an image. I started experimenting with making these partially colored images, wrote a book chapter on it (out soon) and finally… an iOS app where I optimized my algorithm for space and time. (Android is in an early Beta, holla if you want to test).

    The story of how I left the tech industry – of how I built up my confidence enough to walk away – involves this project. The story of how I came back, how I reconnected with who I am as an engineer, how I convinced myself that I was capable… involves this project. It is the intersection of my love of photography, my fascination with art and color, and my need to make things. When I panic about what it means to release it, how I even explain it to the world, I call it my everything project. This, by the way, does not help.

    I did some work with a branding person on it, and she coined the phrase “life is a process, not a filter”. Which is fitting, because the app itself is an image processing app, not a filtering app. But also because if I believe in anything, it’s the mindful application of process.

    I have broken all the rules of how you decide what to build and how you launch something. But the process is the thing. The process was me building the most personal thing I could, and in that doing the most meaningful engineering work of my career.

    A source of inspiration to me are those people who are building the kind of things, or companies, that only they could build. Where they combine the intersection of things that they are great at, the things they find fascinating, to create something exceptional.

    If I want to do that, launching this is maybe step 3/1000. It’s terrifying. But it’s more than time.

    I hope you like it, too.

    Mega thanks and love to Show & Hide designer, my collaborator and friend Jakub.