events/2025-12-07-hwc-photos-meetup
Photography Popup #1 was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-12-07.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-12-07-hwc-photos-meetup
IndieWeb Photography Meetup
December 7th, 2025
Participants
Jeremy Cherfas https://jeremycherfas.net and https://photos.jeremycherfas.net
Mike Kupietz - https://michaelkupietz.com
Aaron Parecki - https://aaronparecki.com
zacharykaiwrites - https://zacharykai.mossymaker = https://mossymaker.com
Al Abut https://alabut.comDavid Shanske - https://david.shanske.com and https://www.gadgetwisdom.com/author/dshanske
pcarrier.com β https://pcarrier.com- Anthony Bosio - https://www.flickr.com/photos/boz/ and https://pixelfed.social/abosio
Fractalkitty - https://toground.link/ and https://www.fractalkitty.com/ and others
Ross A. Baker - https://rossabaker.com/, distracted by hockey practice- Template:AnaOlivia - https://anaolivia.micro.blog, new to blogging
benji - https://benji.dog- ... add names
Planning on showing up:
Tantek Γelik - ~13:00 PST (from AL: sorry Tantek, I kept it to 90 minutes because it's a Sunday but forgot to put the end time in the event. I'll remember that for the next one!)
Notes
What Is Photography? How Does It Relate To The IndieWeb
- Wiki page on Photos: photo
What Can We Talk About?
- Types of photos (e.g. fine art, portrait, etc)
- Sofia taught photography, learn about light textures
- Multiple photos like composites
- Image hosting, CDNs, etc.
- Unauthorized scraping, robots.txt, A.I. firewalls (e.g. Anubis), countermeasures
- Image textures and photo effects and overlays
- Organizing photos within a hosting/storage system.
- Image Metadata
- Editing on mobile vs desktop
- How we share photos on our websites
- Create apps and workflows.
- Responsive images
- procedural art with photography
Photo Editing
- Sofia's tips on using photos as light base for another with blend modes.
- You can draw or doodle on the photo
- Apps: procreate, native camera has lots of setting, Aperture was big for commercial photography (RIP!)
Photo Prompts/Exercises
- Photo of the day (Aaron made an auto-uploader camera app)
Reducing Friction
- Encouraging yourself to take more pictures
- Knowing what kind of "mode" you're in - quick sharing of snaps vs taking time
- Don't worry about the crop in advance, take a larger picture
Types of cameras & lenses
- Focal length of phones is limited
- Jeremy cares about the depth of field a lot
- Mike: "phones levels up most people's skills but limits the super pro"
- Jeremy uses apps like Camera+
- Crop reduces quality as well
- Can't crop a fisheye or action camera as well
- Mike loves macro lenses: "I can't live without it"
- Adding attachments to phones and cameras
- "The best camera is the one you have"
- Kodak Brownie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Brownie
- Fisher Price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL2000
- Anthony takes portraits with a Holga
* https://www.flickr.com/photos/boz/2529072901/ (combined with modern remote flashes) * https://www.flickr.com/photos/boz/263333232/
- Al's friend that shoots with a Hasselblad: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7FrNmxPfeq/
- Speaking of toys, said Jeremy, I used to do a lot of pinholes https://www.flickr.com/photos/jcherfas/albums/708257
- A friend maintains https://camera-apps.com/ if you're looking for new shooting experiences
- Water droplet macros
How to focus on taking apps
- Any kind of camera is inherently more focused than a phone
- On your phone: delete apps and go into airport mode
- Go for a photo walk or photo safari!
Sharing
- Sharing not just photos but also the techniques
- Image maps are an interesting and accessible way to share details in a photo
- The ongoing existential crisis: "do I create more or document what I've created?"
- Don't feel compelled to share everything, just enjoy the end product or even just the process of hunting for a shot.
- Sharing both online and in real life with Creative Commons
- A big mental block for Al Abut is often seeing how great other people's photos and videos
Curating your own photos
- Jeremy will use ratings to sort through intake
- Harder to find good images than it is to cull the bad ones
- I've tried to find the workflow I talked very briefly about, without total success. But I did dredge up 1hour1000photos, which is a page that links to a downloadable, free e-book of that name. It is geared heavily to Lightroom but the three-stage process he describes is the basis of my workflow, except he prefers to tag keepers. I may try that again. The specific commands will depend on the software you use, but the principles are solid. (Maybe I should write it up for Photo Mechanic.)
- Sofia us ed to use stars heavily in Aperture but hasn't found a good replacement
- Jeremy uses PhotoMechanic, not the easiest but it works
- iViewMediaPro used to be great and Mike uses Photo Supreme
- Sofia saw a shortcut on the phone to help with culls
- Question Ross is not in a quiet place to ask out loud: with all the AI chips and features in our phones, at what point do our "authentically human" pictures become "AI assisted" or "AI slop"? If we care about AI transparency, what is our obligation to disclose techniques, and how?
- Sofia keeps it out of her workflow because photography is a sacred space to focus on the artistry and other strong feelings, like friends that are out of work because of a.i. - or just the stealing of work
- Aaron with a great q: where do we draw the line? There's lots of subtle ways that a.i. is coming into our tools without being obvious, like auto-editing colors in iPhone or removing objects in Photoshop.
- The makers of Halide make an app to capture raw images and embrace the "imperfections" like grain
- When does it automate things that we could do ourselves, versus the "black box" of magical superskilled effects. E.g. removing a leash was pain-stakingly hard with old Photoshop skills but doable.
- Where are you the artist/creator in the workflow versus the producer of it?
- If we remove the stigma about using a.i. then we can be more open about when it's being used.
- Ansel Adams used to take a lot of heat for his post-processing edits
- We have choices in what we consume than can also guide our instincts for creation
- AnaOlivia wanted to make a comment on Sophia's take on photographer/creator vs producer. There is a subcategory in modern day called scanography, similar to collage making art. Photographers use a flatbed scanner to create work. This tends to lead more of comteporary/fine art photography. Scanography is an example of bordering definition of this notion. Artist Richard Dawson from London is an example. Kupietz did something like this, a collection of images of objects placed in a scanner as fan art for a favorite musician's birthday: https://michaelkupietz.com/club-birthday-card-2003/ (Including the rather difficult task of getting a good scan of a lit candle!)Thank you for the example!-AO
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