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Alkaline is Photography, Basically.

Author

Ash Ponders
January 06, 2025

Welcome to issue 18 of Alkaline

What happened to issues 1-17? I wrote like 20 of these last year and kept them to myself to prove I could maintain some kind of steady pace and to develop a consistent voice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  Let’s see if it worked. What is Alkaline? It’s a ‘sletter by Ash Ponders about photography, journalism, photojournalism, and getting paid. It’s a mixture of “Look at this pretty picture,” “You’re doing it wrong,” “This person will buy your photos,” “Have you heard of this periodical?” and “Computers are easy, I promise.” 

You’re getting this email because I bothered you and socially pressured you into signing up. You’re going to keep getting these emails because the information is useful and entertaining. You’re going to think about not telling your friends about these emails, because they are valuable and someone has scared you into believing success is a limited resource. You’re going to tell your friends anyway because you’re tired of them being too broke to come to your events.

What even is Enhanced Visual Search (and should journalists be worried?)

Don’t tell me to charge my phone.

The Photos app on iOS is a confusing labyrinth of nightmares and wonders, for most of my friends who barely use any of the features and it’s basically a box where photos live on their phones. But the eagle-eyed and/or paranoid among us may have seen the new in iOS 18 feature Enhanced Visual Search which effectively uses machine learning and some other number crunching to find your photos of certain famous vistas and other points of interest while maintaining an amount of privacy and encryption. Neat, but also under-documented and rife for conspiratorial thinking. Nick Heer has a concise layman’s explanation of what’s happening with your photos if you’re not up for mathematical underpinning of ‘homomorphic encryption.’ 

Bottom line for journalists, there is no reason to believe this feature will compromise your sources or anyone else who has put sensitive photos on your phone. But the feature itself isn’t really impressive enough to warrant being turned on by default. More impressive would be a similar use of hashing to smash these scam texts!

Acacia’s ‘sletter

I have long been terrible at pitching. This makes me a less good journalist and a less good photographer. Stories frequently don’t interest me the way topics do. But as any editor will tell you, topics are not publishable. Maybe you can make an art book or a gallery, but the periodicals want stories, concise 4000 word narratives with 5-25 images.

In her end of the year edition of her relatively new ‘sletter, Acacia Johnson, details her first story for NatGeo and how she moved from her similar predilection for topic-based projects into something suitable for publication in the yellow rectangle. I’m not gonna summarize her wisdom, just go over there and read the whole thing carefully.

Chris Lee finally learns what a sport is

Sending your selects to your friends is community care.

Chris Lee, fellow former bike messenger turned photojournalist, has been telling me and Caitlin O’Hara that he wants to make more sports feature work for, like, years. He’s finally gotten to take a swing at it with a quick morning assignment covering Elizabeth Leachman’s selection for San Antonio’s sportsperson of the year. I love the light, I love the movement. Wonderful work, Chris.

Speaking of San Antonio, check out their year round up too. As I raved about on Bluesky, the photographic skill and talent brought to bear at the Express News is really impressive. I live in a metro area roughly twice as large and frankly our whole photojournalism corps could (and often used to) fit in my living room. I’m envious and jealous. Early January is often the slow season here in Phoenix: maybe I’ll find 30 hours to drive there, say hello, cuddle baby Tupi, and drive back.

Stupid tip for freelancers

For those of us here in the US drowning in 1099s, a new year tip: Update your W2 to with today’s date. Save it somewhere easy to get to, but secure, like 1password or dropbox. Update the date quarterly. But otherwise just send that when whatever outlet asks, you don’t have to re-fill it out each and every time. It’ll make invoicing the tiniest bit less annoying.

A Fucking Magazine

You ever throw your mail on the bushes in your courtyard to make photos of it?

Dating app for real love sickos Feeld launched a magazine they’re demurely calling AFM, at least in public. Under creative director Andrew Peet, AFM has lots of photos, a cavalcade of my favorite authors, and smart design. Issue one is anchored by a kinda gross kinda awesome interview and photo essay on body piercing by Bruce LaBruce. It’s fun. If that seems like your jam, check out this handy if a bit generic pitching guide that at least has the decency to lay out the rates for everything in black and white. I’ll see if I can’t track down some contact info for the creative team 

Some links

Ok Go Home Now

That’s good enough for a first public issue. Tune in next time for “Archive: an introduction” and probably my initial reaction to the coverage of the inauguration. I’m sure that will be measured and reasonable. I’m gonna try to get these out roughly every other week unless something like the news intervenes. If you want to get a hold of me you can email me or call me or whisper tenderly into a freshly dug hole—and I’ll get back to you asap.