Beyond the Grid, Vol. 14 - Unlocked by AI: The Gary Clark Jr. Photos I Almost Lost
On noisy photos, new tech, and a performance I'll never forget.
Every photographer has a digital graveyard. I’ve got 26 hard drives sitting on my desk right now, and that’s not even all of them. They’re full of shoots you loved but never had the time to deal with. I was digging through one of them and found a folder from September 3rd, 2016. Gary Clark Jr. at The Surf Lodge.
Back then, the company I was a partner in did all the content for The Surf Lodge out in Montauk. To be honest, I had a real love/hate relationship with the place. The drive from the city was brutal, and while it was the spot for celebrities, it could get pretty messy. I spent nearly every summer weekend there for years for work, so I was pretty over it. But, it holds a place in my history for one big reason: I met my now wife there a year after this shoot.
On this particular day, we were shooting a multi-angle video of Gary and his band. I was also grabbing stills on the side. The performance was insane. I still watch the video we made pretty often.
But the photos were a different story.
The gear I was using that day was my old workhorse, a Canon 1DmkIV, a model that was actually discontinued back in 2012. That camera was still a beast, with focusing that’s better than some cameras today. But with the sun setting right behind Gary and being stuck in a huge crowd, I was pushing the technology of the time to its absolute limit. To get a usable shot, I had to crank the ISO way up, which left the photos with a ton of digital noise.
I edited a handful at the time, and one of them is still in my portfolio. But the rest were a different story. The noise was so heavy that I knew it would take days of painful, manual editing to make them look decent. So they sat on that hard drive, untouched for almost a decade. I figured they'd never see the light of day.
Until today, actually.
I’ve been playing around with the new AI tools in the Adobe suite, and the Denoise feature is a game changer. It’s not a perfect magic button. It couldn’t help the shots where I missed focus or had too much motion blur from a slow shutter speed. But for the noisy, dark images, it was the key that finally unlocked this entire lost shoot. What would have taken me hours of manual work a few years ago now takes seconds, you still have to dial it back so skin and other details don't look unrealistic but it really works.
Here’s a look at what I was dealing with. The Denoise is now just a simple checkbox in Adobe Camera Raw, but it makes a huge difference. I still did all my usual manual edits to the brightness, shadows, and highlights, but the AI handled the impossible part. On the left is the original noisy file from 2016. On the right is the final, rescued version.
Suddenly, this entire lost shoot was unlocked. I spent a few hours going through the rest, and it felt like rescuing a piece of my own history.
Here they are. The lost tapes from that sunset show in Montauk.
It makes me wonder what other moments are just sitting on our hard drives, waiting for the right tool to bring them back to life. I might spend the next week going through my own looking for more pots of gold.
For all the new subscribers, thanks for being here.
Cheers,
Benny
This is so cool, you must be thrilled!!