Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

Specialized work in precision glass-cracking

I have heard that historians particularly appreciate when people put actual prices as a reference in their diaries, providing that little quantitative insight into the past. In that spirit, I found a July 2026 breakdown of a laser crystal printing business by Bathsheba Grossman, a sculptor and 3D designer who I have always found fascinating and who I am lucky enough to have bought some small pieces from, as well as both given and received others as gifts:

Would you like to be the cube designer? It’s a reliable gig and a fascinating window on the scientific community. It’s complex, high-touch, long-haul, and as it stands not terribly lucrative: a living in most places but not tech money. Getting started could be pretty quick for the right person, getting good takes interest and experience.

This is the 25th year of CrystalProteins, thousands of projects, mainly proteins but also all sorts of other science. It’s mostly just me. I don’t do any marketing, the product speaks for itself and I’ve never wanted to scale past what one person can do. It’s design only, I work in partnership with laser glass manufacturer Precision Crystal. In the last 10 years, average net per year was $57K.

What’s needed? General literacy and love for science. Solid coding, the level where if you need to whip something up in a new language you do it by sense of smell. 3D design. Knowledge or willingness to learn about structural biology and its imaging techniques. A beefy (by household standards) desktop computer. A Rhinoceros license. The tenacity of the cockroach. Desire to belong in the ancient and noble (but not quite artistic) tradition of scientific illustration.

You can pick up the biology, if you’ve got a bit of a knack you can pick up the 3D side. You can’t learn to code for this project. AI does not have reliable knowledge about this very specialized field.

It’s a customer service gig. There’s a lot of emailing with scientists and their administrative colleagues, and one must be courteous, straightforward, respectful of their time and needs. They’re great customers! They truly love the product and are generally happy to work with me, and I’ve never once been stiffed on payment. However when it’s time to write an awkward email or pick up the phone, you’re doing it.

As it stands it’s a part-time job, but not compatible with a 9-to-5 because it’s bursty. Perhaps it could grow. I’ve never felt a limit to demand, only to my willingness to do more. Someone with domain knowledge in molecular biology, or professional programming chops, or (especially) ability to manage a multi-person business, might take this much farther than I have.

I know from friends who are authors and musicians how hard it is to make a living from anything artistic, so it’s intriguing to learn a bit more about this kind of business from an expert who is stepping away from it.

My most notable Bathsheba pieces are the Hemoglobin molecule I gave Amanda; the DNA polymerase cube which Myshka bought me; and the Tetrabox puzzle sculpture I bought in 2018. I also have some jewelery-sized pieces printed in metal.

Photos from the Yellowknife drive

In the summer of 2003, I broke with my long avoidance of air travel so that I could first help my brother Sasha move from Behchokǫ̀, in the Northwest Territories near Yellowknife, back to Victoria, BC.

We did the drive through a vast terrain of wildfires in three intensive days, with Sasha driving.

I had been meaning for ages to get our photos processed, but because of the financial pain of the long PhD all my computers and software are quite obselete and were unable to handle the RAW files from his specific Fuji camera.

I have finally figured a workaround using Adobe’s digital negative (DNG) format, so now the photos are up.

Living across the country and avoiding flying, I have seen far too little of my brothers in recent years. I justified it because I thought I was living my values by making lifestyle choices to reduce my climate impact, and because I still hoped humanity might be reaching a level of understanding where we take the crisis seriously and respond in a useful and adaptive way.

Now I think I need to do a complete re-evaluation of what sort of political project makes sense. Ever since I first became involved in environmentalism in the 1990s, I had thought that eventually the universal experience of how the world is changing in frightening ways would make people willing to make changes themselves. Now, I really don’t know.

Still, I am immensely grateful that I got to spend this intensive time with Sasha and that our relationship is still deep and meaningful after years of almost exclusively telecommunicating. His integrity and determination are inspirations to me, and I try to draw from his example while trying to live my own life well.

Related:

Two October trips

This is going to be a packed month.

For Thanksgiving weekend, I am going on a camping trip with friends to do some trail repair near Temagami.

Then, from the 24th to 27th, I am photographing a diplomatic conference in Montreal.

Both will require a fair bit of packing and preparation, and I expect a week or so of evenings spent post-processing the Montreal photos after work when I return.

AI image generation and the credibility of photos

When AI-assisted photo manipulation is easy to do and hard to detect, the credibility of photos as evidence is diminished:

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

…

For the most part, the average image created by these AI tools will, in and of itself, be pretty harmless — an extra tree in a backdrop, an alligator in a pizzeria, a silly costume interposed over a cat. In aggregate, the deluge upends how we treat the concept of the photo entirely, and that in itself has tremendous repercussions. Consider, for instance, that the last decade has seen extraordinary social upheaval in the United States sparked by grainy videos of police brutality. Where the authorities obscured or concealed reality, these videos told the truth.

Perhaps we will see a backlash against the trend where every camera is also a computer that tweaks the image to ‘improve’ it. For example, there could be cameras that generate a hash from the unedited image and retains it, allowing any subsequent manipulation to be identified.

Related:

Twelve years of commercial photography

At the suggestion of a musician friend, since 2011 I have had an accountant to keep track of all my commercial photography paperwork and prepare my taxes. I just send invoices for every gig I do, and receipts for expenses like lens rentals.

Unfortunately, this year he retired and I have not been able to find a similar alternative, so I am left trying to figure this out myself.

It occurred to me that I have literally never added up the total for how much my photography business has made. This is prior to all expenses and taxes:

All told, gross revenues have been $20,268.75. I have had between 18 (2016) and 0 (2021) gigs per year.

Holding a lease

The period since at least July 22nd has been so consistently busy that I haven’t had time to pause and think any of it through.

There are photos from the Yellowknife to Vancouver drive and from my time in Vancouver.

The one big Toronto achievement is that now, for the first time since I came to the city in 2011, I am on the lease for a place to live. It’s expensive (adding to the urgency of the job hunt) but I have protected long-term legal status there. After having to move probably 40 or more times during the PhD, it will be a comfort to have a place I can more fully rely upon.