MANHATTAN – I met a friend for lunch at the Century Association on 43rd Street. Afterwards I lurked around Midtown with a camera, looking up. I ended up with a number of technically ok images. I asked for advice from Claude, the AI service, in choosing among them. Here’s what Claude said:
The sunlit glass tower rising behind the dark diagonal foreground building is the most resolved composition of the group. The wedge of light against shadow gives it real graphic force, and the street lamp creates an unexpected diagonal that keeps the eye moving. It reads immediately as New York without being a postcard. The Leica handles the tonal extremes well.
Claude doesn’t say that the image is a bit boring, which is the case.
Day 6027 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
Looking back exactly seven years to a lone pedestrian. I take a lot of these – when we walk in the city we have no idea of the actual scale of our surroundings. Day 3,470 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.
I use Claude for a couple of things with my bird photos; generating detailed ALT text, and occasionally dropping two similar frames in and asking which is sharper. That second one is more useful than it sounds; it’s surprisingly hard to put into words why one image is sharper than another.
I’ve never tried it for image selection, but your post got me thinking about it. The response you got is interesting. That kind of editorial language, ‘reads immediately as New York without being a postcard,’ is response I wouldn’t have expected. It seems Claude has a sense of humour.
Your footnote made me laugh. I wonder if explicitly asking for harsh criticism up front changes the output.
Worth an experiment?