London based Photographer

Biffy Clyro: Live at Hackney Church




Media Storm: Photography & Artwork Design

Where fact-checking meets fun, reporting meets road-trip and the mainstream media meets its match... Media Storm is a news podcast that starts with the people who are usually asked last. "Migrants", "criminals" and "sex workers" are some of the biggest stars in the headlines, yet we rarely actually hear from them. Here, we provide a space for these minority groups to get their right of reply. From The House of The Guilty Feminist, Media Storm hands the mic to people with lived experience, to shed new light on old stories and roast the headlines that love to roast them.Lovely shoot with Tilda and Helena - true collaborative goodness from start to finish, what a pleasure! The podcast is out in the world now and going down a treat, give it a listen anywhere you get your podcasts.

Wonderfully assisted by Dylan (the boy can throw newspaper with the best of ‘em).




Gabriel Hummerstone: Carving Your Own Gravestone

It’s a curious thing, to head to Wales to document your friend carving their own gravestone, but that’s what Gabriel is; a curious friend.

This series, much like Gabriel’s headstone, is a work in progress and one that I’m incredibly fond of.





More soon...

Who’s the Director, anyway?

My relationship with photography has been bumpy this year, nobody is behind the wheel and there’s no prizes for guessing why. What’s the solution? Well it turns out it isn’t handing the keys to an artificial mind, but it helped.

This particular artificial mind is called a Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks (though I think it prefers the name StyleGAN) - I fed StyleGAN every film photograph I’ve ever taken and gave it ten hours to train itself as an image maker, learning everything it could about my ‘style’; colour, composition, texture and content. Then asked it to create ‘photographs’ of its own with all that new-found knowledge.



  


While ten hours (or 11,000 steps of analysis/training) isn’t nearly enough for this particular AI to learn, the results are abstractly lovely and I’m interested to see what it would do with a week’s worth of learning.

Below are some of my favourite results and some wonky video of its training steps.
More on StyleGAN here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWoravHhsUU




 




Mark
© Callum Baker 2023 • London, UK • ♥︎