The Future of Modern Photography - Steven Sebring

Steven Sebring is an artist, photographer & inventor. This is a guy who’s invented new technology and advanced the art of photography with the tools that he’s built in a world-class fashion. By his own admission, he is not a technical guy, but when you see what he’s built, you’re going to be blown away.

There’s nothing else in the world like it. There’s a lot of work going on to develop new kinds of capture systems for virtual reality that work in 360° environments. 

Steven came at it from a completely different angle and came up with a completely different solution.  He is putting out the most incredible content that works in 3D and in virtual reality on the planet. No one’s paralleled what he’s doing as far as I’ve seen. You really want to understand Steven and his thought process, and that’s really what we’re getting into in this episode.

I want you to be able to see how an inventor thinks when they’re trying to solve a problem that they understand. We have a lot of situations in technology where we’re building a solution without really understanding the problem or the user whose going to be interacting with it. So, this is an amazing opportunity to get to know an inventor.

I don’t think Steven has ever done a podcast before. He rarely ever talks about what he’s working on. He’s known to industry insiders in fashion. He’s shot a lot of celebrities. He goes way back with Patti Smith. He’s done cool documentaries and film and all kinds of artwork with her. And he’s shot some of the biggest brands on earth and the camera system he built is unlike anything else.

So, anyway, I want you to get in here and understand Steven. We talk about his projects for Donna Karan, Ralph Laureen, BMW, and Spin Magazine. He just has all kinds of commercial work that he’s done. He’s also a guy who has worked on art projects, that if you have any interest in art, you’re going to want to learn about his Muybridge interpretation that he’s done.

I met Steven a couple of years ago when he was doing this groundbreaking project called LIMINAL with Rodney Mullen. Rodney introduced us and we’ve been friends ever since. I cannot wait for you guys to see this stuff. This episode, you’re going to have to go to the website jetpackforthemind.com to look at the Steven Sebring episode. I’m going to post all kinds of cool stuff that Steven has created. There’s a music videos in there with Jack White. There’s all kinds of film and video projects that they’ve done with the camera system. There’s a lot to explore and I think you guys are going to be really impressed with what’s going on.

Pablos: Even though my audience is smart and technical but they know about a lot of different things so I’m not expecting them to know anything in particular. The point here isn’t to dig into the tech stuff too much. What’s much more interesting is you have this amazing, unique career in history trying to advance your tools to support your art. That’s much more interesting than what most nerds are doing. We want to try and pick that apart so people can understand. A lot of what’s holding human back is that symbiosis is missing between the tools in the art, the creation and using technology to enable possibilities.

Steven: This is beautiful. I feel honored to be here with Pablos. There is no nerd here.

It’s not that you’re a nerd. It’s all the nerds are not able to do what they’re doing.

They’re fucking nerds. That’s what they are. Nobody needs a nerd. I could use a few nerds.

That’s one thing that could be valuable here.

We’re definitely needing a lot of nerds to then obey my command.

They thrive when they have some management. You need a dominatrix to tell them what to do all of that. I’m not exaggerating about that. It’s one of the winning strategies we’ve found for some folks with Asperger’s. You get on a dominatrix who tells them what to do at any given moment who can prioritize for that. Who can tell them what to worry about next because they don’t feel they have to worry about everything? It works great because then, they can be productive. In any given moment, they can do the extraordinary thing that they’re good at and the skills that you worry about taking care of the things that they suck at. This notion that somehow the world needs more well-balanced humans, I don’t think I believe it. We have a leader that’s extraordinary.

Everybody is trying to find this balance by getting to the center. That’s the yoga strategy. They’re trying to get rid of every sharp edge and get to this center point where everything is perfectly balanced and hang out there. That, to me, is precarious. It’s not resilient. When you look, it’s trying to balance a teeter-totter on that point or trying to balance a pencil on your fingertips and that’s hard to do. If you look at a barbell, the barbell is balanced through extremes amount of weight on one end and the other. There’s nothing in the middle.

Barbells are prone to be balanced almost all the time. We’re going a little too far with this balanced human thing. When you work in tech with a bunch of folks who are on the spectrum, you start to get an appreciation for what they’re good at. It’s antagonistic to try to make them balanced like normal people which aren’t what they are built for. It’s not what we need them for. You can find somebody else to do yoga and somebody else to eat organic quinoa and all that stuff. The folks with the ability to concentrate and create something the way a lot of folks with Asperger’s have been able to do, that’s special.

That’s interesting. I love your perspectives, Pablos. To think that you fucking come from Alaska.

Nothing in Alaska is normal.

You grew up in Anchorage?

I grew up mostly in Anchorage. I spent about five years in a small town called Soldotna.

It was always dark. Do you get a minute of the sun in the winter?

You would walk to school in the dark and walk home from school in the dark. We’re meandering but I want to back up. I come from the sport fishing capital of America.

Do you like sushi?

No. It’s a problem in relationships.

Do you like cows? Do you like a good steak? Why do you think the cows are fired emissions that are affecting the climate? If everybody quit eating meat for a year, I hear that we would be in a much better situation. Is that true?

Yeah. It’s because the gas is not CO2. It’s methane. Methane is about 26 times as bad as CO2.

We got to do something about that. Why can’t they put cows in a big fucking building that’s taking the methane out of the air?

That is possible. It’s just that they keep trying to make them fart inside of a building.

It might be toxic for them. I would think that the cows would fall over in their cages.

They would. It’s nasty stuff.

What are you hearing about it?

Methane is the exact same thing as natural gas. If you could capture it, put it in cars and you can power the world.

Why can’t they capture that? Why can’t they do this?

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The day of that big photographer is dwindling down because now everybody's a photographer.
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There are inventions which try to capture methane from the farts of cows.

Whoever does that will make billions. Why haven’t you figured that out? We might have in this conversation the answer.

The truth is you could do a lot if you catch that methane because something close to 30% of green gasses is coming from the cow farts.

Why can’t they put a suction cup up to their butt?

There is a patent on that. It’s expired though. It’s an open-source thing. Anyone could stick a suction cup on the bottom of a cow and collect the methane and sell it into the energy market. I don’t know what you’re doing here taking pictures when you can be rich.

I own 1,200 acres in South Dakota with oil on it. I own mineral rights to the land. I can drill tomorrow. I just haven’t drilled.

How did you choose South Dakota?

I inherited it from my great-great-uncle.

Did he want to get it oil?

No. He was a sheep farmer. He had cattle and horses of about over 60 or 80 that ran around on his land. I did a book called Bygone Days of all his found photography and negatives. I remember going there when I was a little kid so I became close to Johnny. He lived in the original sod house that he was born in. It was the first homestead in the area in Dakota. It’s in the North-Western area. It’s incredibly beautiful. He put me in the will to take care of the land and keep the place but I’ve never drilled on it. As soon as I remember, when they were reading the will, people are coming up to me and say, “You can drill. There’s oil here.” I’m like, “Really?” I’ve never done it.

It’s still going to be a little late.

I should have done that deal with Halliburton sooner.

This was your grandfather.

Great-great-uncle of mine and I did a book called Bygone Days on him.

Did you go to visit him?

All the time. I loved it out there.

Where were you growing up?

I was born in South Dakota, Aberdeen and I have relatives in Sioux Falls and stuff that. My parents moved to Arizona when I was one because there were jobs there. There were nursing and teaching jobs, and it was starting to blossom in Phoenix. I grew up in Mesa which is outside of Phoenix. It’s lonely back there and it was suburbia. I didn’t have much culture when I grew up at all. It was cowboys and a lot of cotton fields. If my parents had $5,000 or $4,000 to buy land out there, they would have been great because now it’s sprawling.

Was this in early or mid-’70s or something?

I was born in ‘66. In 1967, we were out there and my sister was born. We lived out there. That was my life.

Is your uncle the one that got photography in your head?

No. It’s bizarre. I was a tennis player. That was my big thing. I was playing lots of tennis. I found a girlfriend of mine and she modeled in Phoenix. I started taking pictures of her and I’m going, “This is cool.” All my family is artists and teachers in the arts. I started taking pictures and I didn’t want to go to college for tennis or anything like that so I never went to college. I graduated from high school. I started a studio. I took pictures in Phoenix. I got over that then I went to Italy. I used to shoot cars and I shot all different things like food and all product stuff. I was into photographing girls. I built a book. I went out to Italy and that’s when I started photographing a lot of models. I came back and I ended up in New York City with this portfolio that I created in Italy and I landed a Ralph Lauren campaign. It was quick and I never went back.

Is that the moment that legitimizes your career as a photographer?

As a photographer, you start shooting a lot of editorials so you do a lot of magazine work before you get a campaign. You’re building your style and your image shooting editorial. For some reason, I did the Double RL campaign which is cool vintage type stuff. My portfolio was about doc style. I had a style for sure. I also did things instead of putting pictures in a portfolio like a normal portfolio, I’d design cards that folded out with my picture. I designed boxes that people would look at my stuff more design creatively and that showed off to people that I was thinking differently and I nailed that.

That’s when I started shooting editorial because once I did the Double RL campaign, I did two of them and that was my launch. I started shooting a lot of male and women celebrities. I started shooting a lot of men’s stuff with L’Uomo Vogue doing stuff for W when W started. It started propelling my career and then I started shooting women. To shoot women’s fashion is a hard thing to get to. It’s the cram of the cram to get the best girls in the world where I could get the best guys in the world. That leads it into shooting women celebrities. I shot a lot of women celebrities for magazines then that propelled me to now.

When the crossover was more about the woman’s celebrity than a model on the cover of a magazine or in an editorial because nobody cared about that, that’s when it was easier for me to do because I was shooting a lot at women celebrities. They became that fashion model in a way. I was on a plane once to LA and I was watching this woman. She had Vogues and all these magazines. I was watching this woman flipped through the magazine. When it came to an editorial with the model, she just kept flipping. When it came to an editorial with a celebrity, she stopped and read. I was like, “That’s a big indication that you have to be branded as a person.”

We had a lot of experience in the last few years of a celebrity being the driver for everything. Now, we have a multitude of celebrities. For the first time, as far as I can tell in human history, their primary thing is being a celebrity. We used to have some legitimizing career to go with it.

If you’re a new model, your mom and dad are celebrities. You’re almost branded immediately. That’s the only thing that people care about now. You see influencers that are branding and they’re doing all these different things. They’re now apparel designers or they have a soft drink. That’s the new thing now to keep up to have a girl come out of the woodwork from someplace. Male America and become a star are very rare anymore because nobody wants to put the work in to brand that. They want it to be already done. You come from this family and now you’re somebody.

There are counterexamples like Charli D’Amelio on TikTok who came out of nowhere doing dance moves. Now, she’s the biggest thing on Earth.

It’s insane. Every brand wants to link up to that because that’s the fan base and that’s how they sell. It’s a crazy time because that fashion or iconic photographer that shoots big ad campaigns that are fantasy and all this stuff has gone down the tube because nobody wants to pay their fees anymore and somebody can do it on their phone. The day of that big photographer is dwindling down because now everybody is a photographer.

In some sense that the tools and skills became democratized because the phone in my pocket is now better than anything, you used in your entire career. You’ve got the same phone on your bike. We all have these tools and it makes everyone think they’re a photographer even if they haven’t done the work to build up the skillset. A lot of those skills are obsoleted. The position we ended up now is what you’re describing where the professional experienced photographer is not being hired for that photo skillset.

Not much anymore.

Their creativity is also less valuable because you’re competing with such a high noise score.

There’s so much noise in how you breakthrough. You see now photographers in the fashion community using Instagram to help promote themselves. The actual photo agent is a difficult time now for them, but there’s only a certain amount of work out there. Now with the pandemic, where are the budgets? You could still be out there and be a cool photographer. It doesn’t mean you’re making money. For me, I’ve always evolved so much because when I was taking pictures, I started getting into film and I was interested in filmmaking. On a job, I met Patti Smith and shooting her for SPIN Magazine. I met her in Detroit and I started falling for her.

That’s when I started like, “I want to start filming you.” I started learning. I didn’t go to film school. I bought a camera and started filming her. It wasn’t video. It’s always a movie film. It’s footage like Sally Lloyd. That was an eleven-year project for me for her and I self-financed it. I was taking my still world and getting into the storytelling world. When people heard I was doing this, that’s when people started having me shoot. I used to do more filmmaking. When I did Donna Karan stuff, I did these two short films. It was when the BMW films came out. These are short stories. I was doing that with fashion brands.

That propelled me into more shooting fashion and then pulling stills from the cameras and that’s your ad campaign. We were doing that digitally with 2K files and we were finding out that it wasn’t enough for resolution for billboards so I went back to Sally Lloyd and I started filming. We’d get 2 for 1. Now with the cameras with the reds and all that stuff which I was one of the first guys to shoot the reds and higher resolution. You were getting 2 for 1 but you had to know how to run the camera to get a still because of motion blur and all that stuff. That’s when I got into app publishing. That’s when I started getting into more immersive content and pushing that.

What year was this about?

I started doing that many years ago. I was always interested in why people are interacting with a PDF file on a tablet and it seemed flat. I started getting into all this 3D stuff and using turntables but nobody made stuff that was automated that was quick that understood my workflow. That’s when I got into this with this camera and putting tons of money into the technologies. That’s how that happened.

You’ll do a better job than this. Describe what you built here and what it’s capable of.

This is the new photo studio. I call it the SRS. It’s the Sebring Revolution System. I put a lot of time into it where it’s automated and fast. You turn it on, you’re shooting and you’re getting 2D stills as well to feed the 2D roll. You’re getting everything done at once.

I’m going to describe it for people reading. We’re sitting in a 30-foot diameter cylinder with twelve-foot walls. It’s white inside. There are 120 DSLRs mounted in the wall all the way around. Every three degrees is twenty megapixels camera. We weren’t going to tell a lot about the tech but the point is, Steven can set up a scene in here, a model, an athlete, a picture of a whole music video, or whatever. He’s filming the whole thing from every three degrees. He’s able to do real-time.

I can tell the cameras what I want them to do. It’s a rabbit hole stuff where I’m constantly trying to find new dimensions and concepts. It’s Eadweard Muybridge concepts but I’m tapping into Eadweard Muybridge who was a genius and who is the godfather of filmmaking. All his studies on Stanford University with multiple camera systems were mind-boggling. What I’m doing is I’m creating the same concepts but it’s staggeringly fast because we need to make content fast and see results immediately. It has that ability and then I started telling cameras to do different things. That’s when I started seeing motion and time.

That’s what all the great masters like Marcel Duchamp with Nude Descending a Staircase. You see Bacon and all these guys who looked at Muybridge photographs. When I started seeing things dragging and seeing a time and the light scene in this 3D world, I started seeing a lot of the cubistic and the Bacon’s and all this stuff. I always had been tapping into the arts and what were they seeing. That’s why I keep pushing these cameras systems so far. I want to go a lot further. I feel like I have now worked this much that I want to take it into another realm.

One of the things here that stands out is you ended up in a different place than the rest of the tech world did in trying to create 3D content. You ended up in a place that’s much more photorealistic and compelling. You don’t have the uncanny valley problems that we have with volumetric capture systems trying to overlay textures on point clouds and all this stuff because you have photos and everything in the photos is real. It’s much more compelling to me. It’s been fascinating to me to be able to interact with the things you’ve created because they have that visceral connection that you skipped over all the problems everybody else is trying to solve.

I’m not letting the tech rule my art and that’s the thing. For me, tech is a way to make new art. A photograph is the purest idea or way to capture a moment. At the end of the day, it isn’t about the cameras you’re using. It’s what you have at the moment. The fact that I’m using these whole camera systems laced with LED systems and it shoots with strobe. I’m not worried now about how I need to light something for an isolated image. I don’t give a shit about that. Honestly, the lighting, contrast and how fucked up I can make the picture and having high resolution, all the isolating tools work.

Even if it’s flawed, that’s okay because that feels new. Everybody is trying to refine it and make it so straightforward and realistic that they’re missing the moment and the art and that doesn’t grab your heart. Nobody gives a shit about that. The fact that I can do it and see things within twenty seconds, it’s done and I can interact with things quickly. I can pull high-resolution stills quickly in all my workflow. We’re now accessing a lot of AI where all the posts workflow is fast so I can generate different assets quickly that work in VR, AR and all this stuff.

The R&D that I’ve been doing here for years, I know exactly what I need to do in camera to eliminate posts. When I work with fashion brands or shooting high jewelry with Tiffany’s or what we’re doing with Christie’s and other auction companies, it’s about how quickly you can achieve the asset because you don’t have a lot of time with this stuff. If I need to do a campaign, I have to get 30 looks and I have to do some broadcast, if I can’t do that immediately in a day, as if I was at a normal photo studio, you’re dead in the water.

Everybody else is trying to spend weeks or months creating 3D models and rendering them per seat.

The money is not Hollywood. This is a thing that is always been important to me because I work with a lot of creative directors and I speak the language, the music and designers. If we can do things working with their existing budgets, you win. If you can deliver things in a day, you win. You delivering it in a way and you’re creating in a way that we all know. I designed these camera systems based on what we, as artists, do. That is where we are different. The approach is what I know and I don’t also want to see technology. When you come to my place, you don’t see technology, green screens and all this. You’re cooler because you see more tag. For me, that’s gross.

It’s the opposite of modeling.

I don’t want to see that. I love that but when you’re working with artists and designers or whatever you’re doing, the aesthetic is about design. I’m very much in design. When you’re working on this camera, you feel like you’re working in an installation and this is like Philip Johnson or Mies Van Der Rohe. You’re tapping into great artists and you’re lighting artists.

It’s an extraordinary experience coming here. All that soulfulness that you’re trying to describe comes through for me. I’ve been here multiple times. It was struck hanging out there. I wanted to take a picture of the theater but you’ve got these camera systems that you’ve developed out here. One of the things I’m curious about that I wanted to pick your brain on is since I’m from the tech industry and we are motivated to advance the technology. We’re trying to get more megapixels in your camera, better specs on everything, more gigahertz, terabits and everything. It’s important. We have this abstract notion in our minds that like, “This is going to matter to somebody someday.” People like you enable artists and creative people to do more. That has been true but you’re coming at it from the opposite side. I don’t think you give a shit about any of those specs or numbers. As you said, you’re trying to hide the technology.

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Tech is just a way to make new art.
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It’s not the arrows, it’s the Indians.

Tell me what that means.

What that means is that if you’re a skilled Indian, you don’t need the best arrow. It’s about what you have. I’m working with cameras that are fifteen years old in some of my older systems.

You’re also the Indian who built the first crossbow.

I’ve never heard that one before, but that’s funny.

That’s the interesting thing to me. You may be a skilled photographer and that’s great and all. There are other skilled photographers and I can’t tell the difference between them and that’s fine. What I can tell is you did something they didn’t do. You took that bow and said, “I want to be able to shoot three times as far. I want to be able to get something well beyond what any other photographer could do.” You built the system to do it. To do that, you had to have the vision for creating this thing. I know that you went through various iteration of this concept and prove that. That’s normal.

As you said, we’re many years in here but all along the line, you had to go engage nerds who could make your vision a reality. That’s one thing I’m interested in is what has that process been like? As far as I can tell, even sixteen years in, you’ve done an extraordinary job of not becoming one of them. I come in here and you were like, “We have cameras and you know what they are.” The point is you had to be able to express your vision for this tool you wanted to create and it’s very technical. There’s a lot of work to build this thing. This is a big hardware development project. You’ve done that and you had to get help. When you first started, where’d you get help?

I started accessing people that I knew that knew developers. I went through the gamut and not being a tech whatsoever. My son knows more things than I do. I’m very slow at it. I’d spent a lot of money and then I was like, “I can’t work with you anymore.” I’d bring in another developer.

What’s an example of why you can’t work with somebody?

They were arrogant. There was something about the arrogance of the developer that blew my mind. I would bring in another developer and they say, “We can’t build upon what he did because he built it in this language where I can’t do.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” “He wrote it in this language and I can’t build upon what he did. I’m like, “What are you talking about? Can’t you finish the job?” He goes, “No, we have to start over.” This was my life and it was hard. At the same time, I’m not making money doing this. I have a life of shooting fashion and making TV commercials so that was my life. That’s how I supported all this tech. I kept throwing money into it and then eventually got the right people around me, developers and coders.

We did a lot of R&D and they were understanding a lot because they were designing software that was my brain. When I saw a glitch in the tasks, I would say, “I want that glitch. Give me a button.” They would say, “We’re having difficulties because of the glitch.” I’m like, “I like a glitch.” That was an interesting moment because they were like, “You like it to be imperfected like not perfect the software.” I wanted perfect software but I wanted to be able to say I want to fuck it up too because that’s when you’re going to get something different.

When I’m seeing a girl jumping in here doing something weird with shooting 600 frames per second, it’s slow-motion stuff, she’s glitching out because cameras are not timing perfectly. I like that but then I want to do it perfectly. This camera shoots 1,000 frames per second. It’s fast. I felt captured a strobe in the filament. That’s how fast this camera can be but if I wanted to put motion with it, I could do that too.

I wanted to push it in such a hard world way through my mind but the challenge was the developer’s understanding of what I wanted. We hired a lot of junior developers because it was something they didn’t know anything about and they had to create it. It was interesting. They weren’t specifically image software guys. They’re guys that were trying to think differently and building hardware that was ours. Everything is proprietary. We were trying to do things like that. It’s one of those sayings that everybody can have an electric guitar but you’re not going to be Hendricks.

You’re always going to come up with your own way of how you’re capturing stuff. They had to have that attitude that we’re trying to find new things that created emotion but also understood my workflow as a photographer. It has to be fast and I have to see playback immediately because when you’re working with creative directors and models or music stars, they need to see it quickly. All a sudden, you’re creating an environment where it’s happening organically together. It’s a true collaboration because you see the content in front of your eyes happening. That was a big push. I didn’t shoot a lot of stuff until my workflow and the post on these cameras were so fast.

We call that rapid iteration.

If I didn’t have that, I was done.

There’s something analogous to that in almost everything in the world. One of the things that we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades in our lifetime is Silicon Valley took over every other industry. The reason is we use software to reinvent those industries. That was powerful. The software gave us this superpower of rapid iteration. Imagine if you’re doing the photoshoot, you’re planning it 1.5 years in advance what you want the picture looks like and you’ve got to get one click and it better be right. You have to plan everything but you can’t chart the timeline, you have it all figured out. That’s not going to be fun. It’s not going to be creative and you’re not going to end up with the image that the world needs right at that moment.

Rapid iteration software development is I dreamed some shit up, write some code and launch it into the world. If it isn’t exactly right, no problem. I’m going to update it tonight or tomorrow morning. We’re launching 5 or 6 versions a day of those these days, which is enough that gives us the ability to steer towards what works and what’s successful. You don’t have to guess a year in advance what’s going to work, delightful, or meaningful to the user or the customer, whoever is at the end of that. That’s what artists like you’re describing, the photographers, were able to do as these tools got faster and faster. Twenty seconds later is fast. Much more you than I started with photography with chemicals so it took you at least a day to see what your picture came out to look like.

I hated that process. When I started shooting, I did a lot of ad campaigns for big designers and I only brought a Polaroid camera. That’s all I shot with it. When the scanner came around, I could scan the Polaroid. It was a huge revelation because when we shot Polaroids, there was a moment of immediate gratification but there was always an off moment about a Polaroid. That’s what I wanted this to be.

I wanted it to be something that you pushed it whether it was lighting or flaring the cameras. It has to have something that felt good because I think about the user. That’s all I think about right now. Brands are now accessing me to design the things on how the user will see, experience the jewel and the fashion. For me, this camera system is the place where you experience the content too. It’s being created in the camera and being seen in the camera. I love those new environment concepts and all this played into this camera when I was building it. Aesthetically, it has to be the new museum as well.

Now, with projection mapping and all this stuff, you can go ballistic. We’re finding a new way to think of a hologram when you’re projecting stuff with motion, now that human being becomes a hologram of itself. We’re doing things where emotionally to any user they’re going to be like, “What is that?” That’s what you want. It took me a second to make it. That’s the more fun thing about it because I get bored.

It’s tough to get you to go shoot in a regular photo studio. Why would you do that?

People ask me, I was like, “I moved on from that because it seems one dimensional.”

Plenty of people could do that and they’re still trying.

This is the thing. They’re all still trying to do the same thing. When I monetize this company, I built these camera systems that other people would understand because they know who I am, our workflow and what cameras we work with.

A regular creative director or photographer come in here and create stuff. They don’t need a nine months training program. They can be shooting tomorrow.

They’re going to be like, “I get it.” The workflow is familiar to them. I call the SRS camera. It’s a camera, it’s not cameras. I always say revolutions because we’re doing different things in that 360 space. We’re calling it different things because being able to do 30 seconds takes in here with dialogue and all this is a different approach. It’s deep and it’s cool. You start adding the voice to it and all these things but it’s all happening in camera. That’s the thing that we understand. We don’t understand the value metric capture, you have to light it flat and you do everything in post. You strip in the backgrounds and stuff like that. It needs to be done more pure and quicker. That’s the way you can meet a deadline in 2 or 3 days. That’s the approach.

There’s some interesting stuff here when you were talking about developing it. I was laughing on behalf of our audience who can relate to the notion of hiring a coder to build this thing or some developer who then tells you that they have to start from scratch because the language is wrong. We’ve all been through that many times. I’ve certainly been through that on both sides where I’m the guy telling you, “You have to start from scratch.”

If it was done this way, we can’t achieve it.

That genius was dumb shit. I’m smarter than him, I’m telling you.

There are twelve languages.

There are more than twelve languages for every day of the year but it’s not just the languages. There are a lot of other things that come out. Some of them might’ve been right but I understand from your perspective like that’s ridiculous. Along the way, you said you worked with a lot of junior developers. It may have been necessary for some sense because they don’t know what can’t be done.

Everybody else is being bought up by Google.

You were still able to make successful progress at least to some point.

I was doing stuff in the wrong way but in those early days, I looked back at those captures and they’re brilliant. They’re stuff that I want to get back to. That’s how crazy that is. I was in the trenches, I looked back at that stuff now and I can see it in augmented reality. That’s isolating material.

That’s one of the interesting things that in the time that you’ve been working on this, the headsets for AR have advanced and you serendipitously made content that was compatible with that.

Before, I even knew what AR was. People are talking in VR and all this stuff. I was interested in capturing a 2D picture and having an interactive on your phone. That was about it. When I started understanding all these other things, that’s when we started testing it all. Even when we were doing Rodney Mullen, it’s an incredible project. He is so inspirational. It all came together through Dhani Harrison. In my early app days, we produced the George Harrison Guitar Collection app. I went to Friar Park and I photographed all Harrison guitars in 360 and all that stuff, and then we created this app that is incredible. Dhani who I adore.

I remember he did the track for Liminal.

He did the track for Liminal and we cut Liminal.

Did he introduce you to Rodney?

Yes. Dhani is a skateboarder. His dad would bring in great skateboarders to Friar Park and all that stuff in and then Dhani started doing some skate tricks in the old cameras that were in a geodesic dome which was cool. It was all mirrored out and it was badass. I’m like, “Dhani, you can skate cool.” Dhani is like, “I don’t know if we can do it.” It would be ultimate to get Rodney captured like this because he is the Holy Grail. I didn’t grow up skateboarding. I didn’t grow up with Patti Smith. I entered these things not knowing a lot. I liked that because I get to know who they are. When I first met Rodney, when he came, did a few things and Rodney started seeing the results, it was heaven.

It’s cool because you come out at it without being sycophantic for sure. In both of those cases with Patti and Rodney, you’re working with a living legend. That could have been true with other skateboarders but what would not have been true is this who Rodney is. He’s perfect for this project.

It was incredible to work with him. As a human being, I absolutely adore him. He’s as much of a brother and I miss being able to talk to him more. We love to talk more, even with Dhani, I don’t talk a lot which is hard. Being able to capture Rodney doing a trick and you still don’t understand what he’s doing, he’s Yoda. All that stuff works in all these new applications. That’s what’s incredible. It works in the augmented reality. We started seeing how my camera systems in the early stages were practically volumetric and this was years ago.

That was a time when I did study a pose, which is 1,000 poses of Coco Rocha. I created the book and those now work in VR, holograming, AR, you can make 3D models because of our data. It lives. If there’s a new application that the tech role created, I know it will work. For me, being able to archive great moments, I always look at what I’m doing is an educational study. It becomes this 3D of Getty concepts where now you’re creating archives of skate, music, and people. It’s like doing this farmer imagery back in the early 1900 where there’s photographing. It’s like Richard Avedon’s Americas. I think like this.