Computational Photography

Pretty soon after it launched, I downloaded Spectre, a “smart long exposure” app by the team behind Halide, the best iPhone camera app (in my opinion). I used it quite often for a few weeks, as one does with a shiny new toy, and then it slowly waned into yet another tool in the toolkit. 

But I’ve found myself using it much more in the past few weeks, and perhaps was most satisfied when I used it to take this photo of Fitzsimmons Creek in Whistler, British Columbia. 

While there’s a lot of talk about what AI is and isn’t good for (that I’m not going to go into), when it comes to AI and computational photography, I’ve been asking myself “What can it do better than I can?” and “How can this push or enhance my practice?” 

In the case of the photo above, time lapse photography has often been used with water as the movement of water over time smoothes it out. Since I didn’t want to (or honestly know how) to change the aperture of the iPhone camera without significantly decreasing exposure and “tricking” the camera into doing what I want, using Spectre seemed like the actual best decision. It gave me control of exposure and the option to pick between a 3, 5 or 9 second capture. 

With a traditional camera, I’d need a tripod to keep still long enough for the image to come out clean, but thanks to Spectre (and AI), I just needed to hold “steady enough.” The image isn’t perfectly sharp because it was cold out and I’m human, but “steady enough” meant that the final product was more than “good enough” in my opinion, especially compared to the alternative. 

This exploration led me to open Spectre more often, even in cases where I didn’t think a time lapse was necessary, simply to see what would happen.

I was back in Whistler last week and had a brief exchange with Om Malik on Glass after sharing a photo in his particular brand of ghostly minimalism that I love. It led me to try out Spectre on the chair lifts, seeing how motion and blur might interact. I’m particularly a fan of this one from the Blackcomb Glacier:

Yesterday, with only enough time for about two runs, I opened up Spectre on the last section of the mountain, curious to see what was possible.

I posted the images below on Instagram stories and I was surprised by people’s reactions to what I thought were playful experiments. I appreciate that stories often act as an invitation to spark a conversation, but what I hadn’t expected was the conversation that resulted with many photographer friends, both about the images and AI. 

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.

Note — for those who asked, here’s the darkroom preset that I used on the last five images.