Robots might be the worst model
I’m often asked to photograph some of the robots SRI International is working with. Those robots are always one of a kind (ok sometimes there is more than one) and it’s challenging to capture a robot as an image. You see a lot of videos of robots on Youtube but rarely images. The reason I believe, is that we think of robots as something in motion, therefore our mental representation of a robot is not static. A robot is per definition something that moves, grabs, fold, paint, etc. (you get the point, it’s not motionless) while a photograph is motionless. How do you capture the concept of robot in a photograph ? The idea I have used (in the image above) is a multi shot image where you can see the robot grasping the object. The other technique that...
On location: From concept to final image
A couple of months ago, I had a call from SRI International looking for hiring a photographer for their new website. SRI is a not-for-profit research center in Menlo Park, CA and they are responsible for some amazing inventions including the mouse, HDTV, and recently SIRI. SRI was building a new website to present the different research projects and they wanted to have one image per project. Each image had to encapsulate the vision and the goal of what the project was about. I was assigned to work with the Artificial Intelligence Center (the folks behind the first version of SIRI). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not very sexy and visual (unless Apple does it). We started with a lot of back and forth between the project manager, the art director and myself on...