Alan Howard Butterworth
I photographed people in London for fifteen years, and then I moved to Montenegro and started telling an AI what to build instead. That was March. Since then two apps have shipped across five platforms, a third is in App Store review, a fourth is in closed testing, there's a newspaper that writes itself every night, and a pipeline for making a film. I say I built them, though I didn't type any of it.
I specify, direct, test and measure,
which is most of the job.
post, relight your photos
You share in a photo. The cloud works out what the scene was going for and relights it around the light that was already there, which is what a cinematographer would do if you had one, and most people don't. It comes back graded and grained. The free ones come back as proofs, with a watermark, and a roll or a subscription develops them. It is in nine languages, on the iPhone, on Android and in a browser, and the Android one is apparently available in 178 countries, which is more countries than I knew there were.
Stock photographs from the site's current pool, run through post, the same set the ads are cut from. Not anybody's phone, and not anybody's holiday.
The hard parts, which is where the money goes. The image model works at two megapixels and a phone shoots at up to forty-eight, so the detail has to be put back afterwards without putting back the things the model deliberately changed, and I know it works because I measured it against a plain upscale rather than looking at it and hoping. Image models also like to replace small faces with plausible strangers, so there is a step that puts the original person back, and HDR has to stay the right way up however the phone was held, which I found out about when a landscape came back with its sky underneath. One subscription contract covers Apple, Google and Stripe and is checked on the server, because the three of them do not agree about anything, and the nine languages go all the way down to the privacy policy, each read by two native speakers who didn't know about each other. It has been through App Store review several times, once backwards.
post pro
The one for photographers who work in Lightroom or Capture One. You give it a batch and it gives you back a layered 16-bit PSD you can mask, which is the part the consumer app politely refuses to do. Mac, Windows and browser, and the Windows one matches the Mac pixel for pixel, which I know because a harness compares every layer and tells me when it doesn't. The Windows version took ten days, which I'm told is not normal.
Now Not Now
A to-do app for people whose sense of time has two settings, now and not now, which turns out to be quite a lot of people. You say one jumbled breath into it, a word comes back in about a second, and overnight a server works out tomorrow's short list. It was built in eight days, and the model behind it was picked by a test over ten candidates on accuracy and what a night's work costs, which came out at less than the electricity. You can plug in your own Claude or ChatGPT if you'd rather, and it won't be offended. It is in App Store review as I write this, which is taking nearly as long as building it did.
Runt, You Betta Run
A running coach with opinions. Four voice modes, from silent up to a chap called Alan explaining jogging at you, heart-rate monitors, auto-pause, music that gets out of the way, and a training plan worked out in advance rather than on the hoof. It looks nothing like the other two, which was the point. In closed testing for now.
post cinema
the poster for bite the big one, the feature the pipeline is being built to make. faith is a dangerous thing.
A pipeline for making films with AI without losing track of what you've made, which is harder than it sounds, and I'm using it to direct a feature, so I've had the chance to find out. A scene is one text file, one Blender file and one DaVinci Resolve timeline. An agent blocks out the set in Blender, the previz decides the timing, and a compiler turns the script, the location, the style and the character references into a brief for every shot with a lockfile, so a shot rendered again a month later comes out the same, rather than slightly different in a way nobody can explain. Before any money is spent on a render, a gate checks the first frame against the previz. If an input changes, the takes that depended on it are marked stale. The edit goes together in Resolve by script.
There's a Vision Pro app that goes with it. You walk round the virtual set, drop numbered markers where the cameras should go, and talk. The walk is transcribed and the markers become cameras in Blender. I perform every part and an AI swaps the voice, which has simplified casting considerably.
post hoc
My own desk for live portrait sessions. The camera tethers in, the raws are developed into my look, and the frames get ranked as they land. Star one and an agent writes a render prompt, calls an image model and drops the result back on the board, so the client sees finished pictures while the shoot is still going, which they find either delightful or unnerving. I've had both.
Behind it is the bit I'm proudest of, I think. I trained a neural network on fifteen years of my own retouching, harvested out of my Capture One archive, and in a blind test I picked my own retouch from the machine's about half the time, which is chance. Then it was shrunk to fit on a phone without changing what it does, and the exposure and white-balance rules it learned turned out to be better than my average adjustment. I've decided to take that as a compliment, and in fairness it did learn from me.
the reel: alice, august 2026. twelve looks off her pinterest board, each one ordered with a star. lighting and world rendered, face and costume locked.
the daily post
A newspaper for one reader, which is me, written overnight and on the doormat every morning since 18 August 2026. An editor model reads the feeds and picks the day's stories, staff writers write each one from several sources with the attribution left in, a sub-editor enforces the house style with the facts and quotes locked, and an art department commissions three pictures a day and captions them as dramatised, and if the image model refuses one it goes back and asks differently. It comes out as a web edition and a Kindle book, and if I thumb a story down the brief amends itself for tomorrow. It has not sulked once.
The style sheet bans the habits of machine prose, which I found by counting them in the paper's own back issues, and there were a lot. An edition costs about the price of a sandwich, and it has never missed a morning, which is more than I can say for the newsagent.
finishedinpost.com
The site for post. A black page, a wall of photographs that fade from before to after as you scroll, and one line in a paper bar. Press and hold anywhere and every before comes back at once. There is sound, if you tick the box, and the box says it is better with sound, which is true. It is in nine languages, every one of them read by two people who didn't know about each other.
The ad films are rendered from this page itself, by code, timed to the voiceover off a spectrogram and mastered to broadcast loudness, so a new cut takes seconds rather than an afternoon. The press and hold on this page is a copy of that one, in fairness.
thetrick.uk
The site for the novel. Black, then a projector strikes a line, fragments of the book's paperwork flicker in as microfilm, the line turns on itself, and the title slams in while a dozen projectors switch on one by one and assemble the archive behind it, with the falling man standing in the beam. It never scrolls. Four typed strips along the bottom open reels instead, the document, the serial, the recording, the exhibits, and the film jumps the gate between them.
Bottom right there is a radio, which you have to switch on yourself. A dial, a needle you can drag, and band-passed static made in the browser. Every frequency is dead air until the programmes exist. There are about 340 takes waiting, so it won't be dead for long.
What happens when the tool you want doesn't exist and the cost of making one has fallen through the floor. None of these are products. A couple of them are barely software.
- eBay. When I was moving out of the flat I had the AI sell the contents. A camera tethered to a watch folder, eBay's API, and a written negotiation policy it was allowed to run on its own. There wasn't a lot to it, but it sold a lot of things, and it carried on after I'd left the country. It is still at it.
- The marketing machine. Generates photographs designed to trap a naive photo app, runs them through the real pipeline, has an AI judge score the results, and cuts the ads from the winners. The ad films are rendered from the website itself by code. Then it ran the campaigns, and bought users at a price I'd have taken.
- post office. A private iPhone app for the day's numbers, the funnel, and finding a customer's account when they email, which they do.
- post box. A Photoshop panel that does generative fill properly, on my own key, with a reference image.
- Bar Guide. A couple of hundred places in Bar, Montenegro, with notes, and GPS-triggered audio walking tours with a voice that is not quite mine.
- entrenched. A relaxing satirical web game about the machine gun. Ten levels with no resistance, then a part two you cannot survive. Built in a weekend. Play it, it won't take long.
- Tooth and Claw. A daily evolution game for a group of friends on a deadpan flat Earth. An AI referee decides overnight. In design.
- Portrait sets. AI portrait sets of real clients from reference photographs, sold to returning headshot clients. The model was chosen in a head-to-head in which the other one kept losing the client's face, which the client would have noticed, and each frame is checked for likeness before it goes out, for a fraction of a penny.
- I measure before I choose. When a model choice matters I build a corpus, blind it, score it and pick on evidence and cost. I've done this at least a dozen times, for vision models, image models, transcription in my own voice, and lip-sync for the film. It is the single most useful thing I do and it is mostly spreadsheets.
- Every AI call has a price on it, and the price goes into the decision rather than the report afterwards, where it is too late to be interesting.
- Kill switches and gates. A flag on the server so a feature can be turned off without a release. A check before credit is spent. A dry run that shows the fees before a listing goes live, because eBay's fees are not quite what eBay says they are. I checked.
- Ports are checked, not eyeballed. iPhone to Android, Mac to Windows, Python to the phone, each against the original's numbers.
- The repo is the memory. Every project carries a log of decisions with dates and reasons, so a fresh session, human or otherwise, can pick up where the last one stopped.
Fifteen years as a portrait photographer in London, a couple of thousand people (head-shot.co.uk). A novel, The Trick, which I also read aloud for the audiobook, every word of it. A philosophy degree, which comes up more than you'd think. The studio closed in September 2026 and I moved to Montenegro, where the light is better and the rent is lower, in that order.
I'm looking for one or two days a week of work for people who need something built, evaluated or shipped, and would rather have someone who has done it than someone who can describe it. Freelance, remote, UK hours. The quickest way to reach me is Instagram, for now, which I realise is not a sentence a serious person writes.