…extending the previous side quest about partnering with AI while photographing swim meets…
This is a problem every event photographer has. In my case, a weekend swim meet leaves me with 2,500+ frames. Maybe 100 of them deserve to be seen, 24 can be elevated into my humble variant of “bangers,” and finding those 24 involves mind-numbing work and literally takes the same amount of time as shooting, often more.
I also have spent a decade making the same kinds of edit decisions in Lightroom, over and over, without ever writing down what my taste actually was.
So I built a partner who could learn it. His name is Tom, after Tom Thomson (and the slug of this post is for the Hip fans out there: “Bring on a brand new renaissance, ‘cuz I think I’m ready..“). He’d apparently plan a vocab of concepts he wanted to paint, then go to the wilderness ’round Algonquin looking for the “shot” he wanted to frame. At least that’s what I’m gonna believe and not get in the way of a good metaphor.
Because that’s the point: I should be focused on the joyful stuff, the creativity, the applying of my own style and trying to elevate a few. Every meet I look back at my last meet’s photos and cringe, and figure that’s a good thing; I’m improving.
The AI pixie dust lives outside Lightroom. There’s some web UI. When we take it to Lightroom, Claude and I communicate through xmp “sidecar” files. (In other words, the north star is, don’t try to replicate Lightroom, live within it, and extend it).
I have no doubt Adobe has thought of this, or something like it, as well. I’m aware of cull assist but this is some next-level stuff. There’s a “baseline” layer (fix the car-crash white balance and lighting of shots in a venue where flash is prohibited etc.) and a “taste” layer (what style am I going for); there’s gray area between the two but I treat these as distinct.
Total costs if I’d run a meet through the API would have been less than $50 (It’s a cocktail of Haiku and Sonnet).
It is very interesting to me to think about (1) how this scales and (2) how I can evolve the system from here.
P.S. The last meet I shot was LITERALLY CALLED AGI – come on universe, that’s a little on the nose, no?!