A Walk in the Park with Claude

It is finally starting to warm back up in the Deep South. And never a minute too soon either. Every time we think cooler weather might be nice and it goes below 60°F we remember that cold is not our thing. This week baseball is back and temps are in the 80°s so it's getting better.

I finally make it back here to the blog after spending the month of February buried deep in a rabbit hole called Claude. And if you are a photographer and have never used Claude, just stop reading this post right now, go get an account and start using it. You can thank me later.

I've been through a few technology or Internet revolutions in the past few decades, like the .com bubble, that was fun, but now we are firmly in the AI time in history, and it is just barely getting started. As a photographer talking about AI just let me clarify there is a big difference between using AI to accomplish tasks, using it to build things, and using AI to create photos that then get passed off as, well, photos. I still want my photographs to be taken by a human pushing a button capturing a slice of history.

I'm talking about the part of AI you use to build things, create things, like photographers have done for a hundred years, creating images. The things that can be done using these tools are astounding. I wrote a post back in 2022 called ChatGPT Will Be an Incredible Productivity Tool thinking like we all did, or still do, that these tools will be a nice way to Google search without going to Google, but that is long gone now.

Lightroom and Claude

Think about your Lightroom library and how many images you have in there. Think about all the data stored away, stored away potential, waiting to be utilized properly. If you take a peek at my Lightroom library above you can see I have 813,060 photos in there. When I started messing around with Claude it was pretty obvious that the possibilities became literally endless in what it could do (and woah, Claude Code is only a few months old!).

If you are wondering what it could do, that is up to your imagination, but I started looking at big issues, like can it take my entire catalog, create a thumbnail of each file, then take that data and make it into a website that could be browsed. Turns out, no problem. Sure it takes some time, and a lot of brain-pain learning, but it's certainly possible.

What I have been doing with Claude in conjunction with my photography is to get a wholistic plan for my online content and find a way to build out a future for all my websites, storage, domains, and the like. I finally got around to building a website for my tech services at Fillmer.co and another one for a media repository at slf.media to house my online images, starting a new blog build at scottfillmer.xyz that runs on markdown files, and a huge number of other things that are still in the works.

A Walk in the Park

I am not going to say any of this is "easy" in the way that we think things are easy today. Nothing worth doing today is truly a one click, pre-made, instant gratification result item. And neither is creating... anything. Things like ChatGPT and Claude can give you some super powers you don't already posses, but you still have to have do the work, have the motivation, time, effort, drive and creativity to accomplish new things.

In case you were wondering, yes we did actually go take a walk in the park, with Edgar. Time out in Loki in the peace and quiet of nature, away from the computer, is always so amazing. We drove out to a state park nearby at Lake Martin and had lunch and tested out some video stuff for YouTube. There was still work going on since we were working on a video, but just being out among the trees was so nice. Here are a few photos from that day. We also have a post over on our travel blog if you want to see the whole gallery.

As far as my plans for Claude... I'm creating, building, and dreaming. I have always wanted a way to own my own content (all of it... email, text, photos, blog posts, essays, notes), to not be at the whim of any one platform or company. To become platform agnostic is a fight worth fighting. Starting with the launch of Facebook and continuing to present day, our content has been used, scraped, violated (copyright), sold, and manipulated to the benefit of those who control the platform it's on. To take back the ownership aspect is a battle, but one I'm willing to fight for, starting with my websites, photos, and any other online content. Before Claude and other AI tools I'm not sure this was even remotely possible other than just throwing your hands up in the air and quitting. Now anything seems possible.

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