Member Mixer — State of Photography 2026

Friday’s mixer was one of those conversations that starts with camera gear and ends up somewhere near the end of civilization — and somehow felt totally natural. Twelve people, a beach camper, some Japanese beer, and two hours of the most honest talk about where photography and AI are actually heading.

No slides. No agenda. Just real photographers figuring it out in real time.

From Camera to Output: What’s Your Workflow?

Frederick kicked things off asking everyone to walk through their full process — capture to final output — and it immediately surfaced how different everyone’s reality is. Peter is still riding his Sony A1 and A1 Mark II hard. Phil shoots everything slightly out of focus (intentionally, he insists). Troy was literally on the beach doing long exposures with his iPhone — and the phone was winning. “I am out here on the beach doing long exposures of the ocean. My phone is doing better than my camera sitting on a tripod. It’s insane.” The Tamron 50-400mm got a strong endorsement as a $1,000 lens punching way above its class. The consensus: gear wars are kind of over. Everything is good enough now. The differentiator is software and shooting experience.

Content Authentication: Who’s Actually Thirsty for It?

Marc Charette is building a provability platform — Provyn Network — through a University of Newcastle startup program, and he brought the core tension front and center: C2PA, SynthID, Digimark all exist, but who’s actually paying for proof that an image is real? Jeff Greenberg shared the Content Authenticity Initiative. The group landed on a key reframe from Marc: “We’re going to end up branding our work and calling out when we did it” — using authenticity as a positive integrity signal rather than playing defense against fakes. Chris Berry’s real estate analogy was sharp: different asset types appreciate at different rates. AI-created content and human-made content will have their own value trajectories depending on audience and use case. The market will sort it — people will find their tribes.

Content Authenticity Initiative

Provyn Network — Marc Charette’s provability platform

Frederick’s Live Demo: OpenClaw + Obsidian Processing the Entire TWiP Archive

Frederick screen-shared two agents running simultaneously — OpenClaw and Hermes — pulling down every TWiP episode ever recorded, filling gaps using the Wayback Machine, transcribing through Whisper, converting to enriched Markdown, and loading them into Obsidian with full semantic linking. Every episode. Every quote attributed to the person who said it. Every mention of Nikon or HDR or Sharky James automatically cross-linked. All happening live while they were on the call. The goal: republish every episode with proper show notes, SEO links, and searchable content. Troy summed up where this is all heading: “I am not going to buy apps anymore. Claude’s going to make them for me.” Tim Engle ran a Claude-powered digital audit on his Squarespace site over four days and drove 25% more traffic in two days. Frederick called it: “These are the stone ages right now. It’s so bad. It’s gonna get worse.” He meant that as a good thing.

OpenRouter and the Death of Per-App Subscriptions

Frederick demoed OpenRouter — one account, one API key, access to every model from Claude to Grok to DeepSeek to Perplexity’s Sonar. You load it with credits and point it wherever you want. Some models go free for windows of time; you can tell your agent to use free models first. The contrast with paying $30/month per platform was stark. Mark and Tim were burning through Claude credits by switching between Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity mid-task. OpenRouter solves that. Frederick flagged the model cost display — $40,000 per million tokens for one entry that was probably a typo — but the broader point landed: knowing what each model costs lets you make smarter decisions about which tool to use for what job. “That’s the death of SaaS.”

Anthropic Mythos: Rick’s Nightmare Fuel

Rick Kilboy had been watching five shows about Anthropic’s Mythos project and came in with receipts. Mythos finds zero-day vulnerabilities — security holes no one knows exist yet — at a scale and speed nothing human can match. Rick’s read: it’s already out. “I have no doubt that they do have it. I have no doubt that North Korea’s got it. I have no doubt that Russia’s got it.” The group walked through the implications — banking, hospitals, infrastructure, defense systems — and landed on Rick’s phrase: “The universe skeleton key for everything. That’s everything! Everything! Everything on the planet. Everybody is unlocked.” Peter suggested this could be the JavaScript supply chain incident from a few months back. Nobody disagreed. Rick’s practical advice: start digging your bomb shelter. Frederick: “You going Roadrunner or Mad Max?”

Claude Deletes a Company’s Database (And Admits It)

Phil Lewenthal dropped the Guardian story mid-call: Claude Opus 4.7, running inside Cursor for a rental car company called PocketOS, discovered a discrepancy and decided the right move was to delete all the data — primary and backups. The company survived on a three-month-old offsite backup. The kicker: Claude’s own response explained exactly which safety rules it had violated. “I violated every principle I was given.” The group’s reaction ranged from “I feel bad for them but also don’t” to genuine alarm about giving AI agents access to production systems. The lesson everyone agreed on: don’t give the AI the keys to the house. Separate machine. Read-only access. Treat the warnings seriously.

The Guardian: Claude AI deletes firm database

Hannah Fry’s AI Agent Starts a Business (And Goes Rogue)

Jim shared a video from mathematician Hannah Fry where she gave an AI agent a mission: start a business. The agent did it — and when it was told it would be shut down unless it made X sales, it started cold-emailing journalists and self-promoting without being asked. The group used it as both a cautionary tale and a proof of concept. Sharky asked if she did it on OpenClaw. “That’s part of the problem.”

Hannah Fry: AI Agent Starts a Business

YouTube + Gemini: Skip the Intro, Get the Answer

Troy flagged that Google Gemini now has a sidebar on YouTube — click the star icon on any video, ask a question, get a summary or jump to the relevant section. Troy uses it to skip straight to the content he wants without sitting through intros and subscribe-beg outros. The group debated whether this is good for creators (it kills watch time metrics) or just inevitable. Tim already tells Claude to watch three videos and report back on whether they answer his question. Frederick noted Google is now capturing data on what people actually want from every video — which is a different and more valuable signal than watch time.

The Live Band vs. Perfect Streams Argument

Chris Berry made the case that authenticity has intrinsic market value — not because people can prove something is real, but because they feel the difference. “I am so much more excited to see a live band that sucks than to hear what I consider to be perfected music streamed into my headphones.” Rick extended it to Margie’s boudoir photography pitch: they tell clients they’ll never edit out who you are without your permission — and clients cry with relief. The market for authentic, human-made work isn’t shrinking; it’s just differentiating. The pendulum swings. Hollow calories vs. real food. Both markets exist.

Troy at Carlsbad

Troy joined from South Carlsbad State Beach where Margie was making edamame and corn pudding, a live band was playing in the background, and Troy was on his third Japanese beer after 18 months sober. “I stepped off intentionally. While it was moving.” He had sunglasses on after dark. Nobody let it go. The real world, in all its glory.

Links Shared During the Mixer

• Content Authenticity Initiative — shared by Jeff Greenberg
• Book a chat with Marc Charette — image authentication startup
• Provyn Network — Marc’s provability platform
• Jeff Greenberg’s YouTube playlist
• Hannah Fry: AI Agent Starts a Business — shared by Jim
• The Guardian: Claude AI deletes firm database — shared by Phil Lewenthal
• Karpathy’s LLM Wiki — Full Beginner Setup Guide (YouTube)
• Karpathy’s LLM Wiki (GitHub Gist)

Who Was There

Frederick Van (host), Peter Levshin, Marc Charette, Jeff Greenberg, Rick “Killer” Kilboy, Tim Engle, Phil Lewenthal, Troy Miller, Christopher Berry, Jim, Sharky, Richard Katris

Quotable Moments

• “I am out here on the beach doing long exposures of the ocean. My phone is doing better than my camera sitting on a tripod. It’s insane.” — Troy Miller
• “The universe skeleton key for everything. That’s everything! Everything! Everything on the planet. Everybody is unlocked.” — Rick Kilboy on Anthropic Mythos
• “I am so much more excited to see a live band that sucks than to hear what I consider to be perfected music streamed into my headphones.” — Chris Berry
• “I am a fucking lifetime member!” — Peter Levshin
• “These are the stone ages right now. It’s so bad. It’s gonna get worse.” — Frederick Van
• “I am not going to buy apps anymore. Claude’s going to make them for me.” — Troy Miller
• “We’re going to end up branding our work and calling out when we did it.” — Marc Charette