Why I shoot film while building AI
My day job is building AI that interviews hundreds of people in the time a recruiter used to screen one. Speed is the product. Then on weekend mornings I take a Leica M6 out into the street and shoot a machine that gives me nothing back for ten days. That’s how long it takes the lab to turn a roll around. I drop it off and walk out with no idea whether a single frame worked.
I get asked about this contradiction enough that I’ve had to actually think about it. Here’s where I landed.
A roll of Portra 400 gives you 36 frames. Every frame costs real money before you’ve seen it. So you slow down. You look at the light longer. You wait for the moment instead of spraying at it. You skip the shot that isn’t there. Half the craft of shooting film is deciding not to press the button.
I own a digital Leica too, and I shoot it more days than not. Digital removed the constraint, and mostly that was a gift. But something got lost when every photo became free. When you can take a thousand pictures, you stop deciding which one matters. The choosing moves from before the shutter to after it, and those are not the same skill. One is attention. The other is triage.
There’s no undo, either. This July 4th I pointed the M6 at fireworks. Long exposure, manual everything, no screen to check. I found out at the lab whether I got anything. You commit, and you live with the gap between the decision and the result. Most of what I do as a founder works the same way. You make the call now and the scans come back in a quarter.
I think about this in the context of what I build. AI is the biggest abundance machine ever made. Everything it touches becomes cheap and instant: words, images, code, answers. That’s mostly good, the way digital photography was mostly good. But abundance is only useful if somewhere in the system a human is still paying attention, still deciding what matters, still willing to wait for the thing that’s actually right.
So the two aren’t a contradiction. They’re the same belief pointed in opposite directions. At work, I use AI to remove the wrong scarcity: the hours in a recruiter’s week that decided which applicants got seen. On a Saturday morning with the M6, film restores the right scarcity: the attention that decides what’s worth a frame.
AI removes the wrong scarcity. Film restores the right one. I’d like to keep both.