That feeling when best-laid plans turn out to be only middling well-laid and you need to turn a website into an archive of sorts, at least for the time being.

www.colophon.cards

Bath, UK, which is where I was living in 2015, is similarly picturesque. Hard to go wrong with these sights.

This would be enough. For a while.

A photo of what looks like 19th century buildings by the river Avon in Bath.A photo of what looks like 19th century buildings by the river Avon in Bath. Some of the structures look partial in some way.A very picturesque sight of the river. Boats along the banks. A Gull flying over old buildings. Everything looks serene.A gull flies over an odd-looking building that juts out over the river.

The photos from the iPhone 6 are for the most part spur-of-the-moment snapshots. That’s freeing, but not really conducive to practicing your photography and getting better at it.

But with good light and Reykjavík as the subject matter, it’s genuinely hard to take a boring picture

A photograph of the view surrounding the University of Iceland with the Pearl on Öskjuhlíðin hill in the distance.A winter view of the wetlands that’s next to Reykjavík airport.A view over the frozen pond in Reykjavík. You can see Hallgrímskirkja in the distance.A view of the pond and Reykjavík city hall. Part of the pond is frozen but the birds keep to the part that isn’t.

We’re up to 2011 in my personal history of my amateur photography and I had given up on dedicated cameras. Or so I thought. Phones are replacing cameras, right?

Well, no. Not in 2011. It wasn’t until I upgraded to an iPhone 6 plus in 2015 that I got a phone camera worth using.

People walking in Reykjavík city centre while it’s snowing.A photo of people by the pond in Reykjavík city centre. The pond is frozen solid.

This opinion, though unusually clearly stated here, is getting quite common and is why I’m writing less about the practical risks of generative models

It isn’t possible to have a realistic discussion when the other side thinks AI is people and can be used to replace people

A social media post with the avatar and user name blacked out. It says “You couldn't possibly be more wrong if you tried. GPT is already basically indistinguishable from sentient. Smarter than 99% of human experts.”

“Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational”

“Why are websites embarrassing?”

I mean, fundamentally it’s because managers in charge of websites care less and they care less because web quality is disconnected from business outcomes.

I just published “That thing where you change your mind”

For the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing to launch a new blog. But now I think I probably shouldn’t.

Fucking micro.blog dropped three whole photos from the cross-post. That’s after a fifteen minute lag in posting

I really need to find a replacement service for cross-posting to mastodon and bluesky. Dropping content is not on

That thing where micro.blog just fucking refuses to publish a post unless you post another to flush it out

So, we’re up to 2010 and I’ve been asked by my friend, Tom Abba, to document the making of a project of his. It’s an interactive video, print, art mix doohicky that looked quite good and was fun to photograph

The silhouette of the crew that worked the set.We see the backs of the two actors through a crack in the door.A close-up of the mask that features prominently in the project.

“Falling For Oklch: A Love Story Of Color Spaces, Gamuts, And CSS — Smashing Magazine”

“Cerebus: Misogyny and Madness – Literate Machine”

It’s also thousands of pages of unbridled hate speech.

Yeah. Dave Sim is not a good person.

That thing where micro.blog’s Mastodon poster posts entries out of order.

Not that I wasn’t also taking landscapes like everybody else. You’re practically required by law to take landscape photos when you travel Iceland.

Gulls and other birds fly past a vertical cliff.Cliffs soar over the oceean. A tiny speck on one of them turns out to be a person.

Here we get to the problem. The pictures I personally liked the most were pictures everybody else skipped over. Like these two pictures, to me, say “Hverfisgata, before it was destroyed to serve tourism”. They evoke a time when it was a street of purpose, if scruffy

An entrance to a “kaffistofa” as the sign above the door says. This is the opposite of a café. A place where coffee is a utilitarian beverage.A picture of the display window of the used book store in Hverfisgata. The owner has hung a series of prints with captions on a clothesline.

Then, late 2008, I go myself a Canon G9, a digital camera with a built-in zoom lens. It was objectively a step down in visual quality, but was instead a massive improvement in photography ergonomics. So much fun to use.

Somebody had taken their shoes off and left them on the rocks.An Icelandic horse looks at us with curiosity. (This is a type of horse, not their nationality, though it was Icelandic too) We see the see and, in the distance, an island that juts out of the ocean like a tooth.

Until around 2008, I was mostly a DSLR photographer. My frustration with photography was mounting. I wouldn’t say that I’d plateaued but it felt like the pictures I was taking lacked personality and expressiveness. In hindsight I was probably overly self-critical.

A seagull flies over Reykjavík City HallSomebody is looking out to see, turning their back on us.My grandad, then in his seventies, winks at the camera.

“LLM Security”

“The value-destroying potential of AI”

👇🏻

A lot of the people trying to deploy AI as a business solution are doing it because they don’t know how to measure what’s valuable about their business

👆🏻

This one, from last year, is of a male blackbird in the same tree.

A male blackbird looks at the camera with suspicion in between pecking at the berries in a rowan tree.

It’s the time of year when the local starlings and blackbirds hoover up the berries of the rowan in my building’s back yard.

A common starling picking at some berries in a rowan tree.

Most of the pictures I took during this period were of people—friends and family. The only ones I’m really comfortable posting are those of my late grandfather. I’m sure he’d just laugh at me if I expressed qualms about posting them now.

My granddad smilingMy granddad, Ingvar Magnússon, looks out of his living room window.

I’ve always limited my spending on photography

Spending creates obligations and those will inevitably begin to dictate your practice

Not that I had figured out at this time what sort of photography practice I’m interested in. But New Year’s Eve is always visually interesting

New Year’s Eve 2006 in Garðabær. A lot of fireworks and people watching through the hazeA person is watching the fireworks. Seen from behind, we can’t tell who they areA couple walks along the pond in Reykjavík city centre. On their way home after a New Year’s Eve party. Or on their way to a late party.

One of the early excuses to “camera” I got with my first DSLR was a free midday concert that Sigurrós held in 2006. Being a daytime performance in the middle of the summer, the lighting was close to ideal and the only thing that held me back was a lack of a zoom lens

Jónsi centre-stage at a Sigurrós performance. Colourful lighting abounds.