# Hedra photography (v2, Oct 2026)

Give this file to your agent and ask for one of these. The agent replies with finished, ready-to-paste prompts in code blocks, with no placeholders left to fill.

| Request | Agent returns | Run in |
|---|---|---|
| "An image of [subject]" | Scene + **style block** | **Nano Banana Pro** |
| "…with the Hedra effect" (optionally "speckle", "bleed" or "ribbons", plus a palette name) | Step 1: scene + style block. Step 2: an **effect prompt** in one Meadow palette | Step 1 **Nano Banana Pro**, step 2 **GPT Image** |

**The process:** Nano Banana Pro makes the realistic photograph. GPT Image adds the effect as a separate second step on the chosen photo. GPT redraws the whole image, so always **composite**: layer GPT's result over the original and mask in only the effect. The same looks can be made directly in the **Hedra Brand** tool, which is the reference for how they should look.

This file replaces the effect section of `photography.md`. The photography rules below are a condensed version of that file; the colour range was narrowed on 29 Oct (see **Colour range**).

## The photograph

**High-tech subject, human feeling.** Real, current, high-end technology or the modern places it lives, made warm and human through light, composition and a gentle film feel, not by adding people.

1. **A 1960s eye on a 2020s world.** The look of 1960s architectural photography (Ezra Stoller): rich, deep Ektachrome colour, inky blacks, symmetrical modernist framing. Cool and clean, never faded, yellowed or vintage-washed. Everything in front of the lens is today.
2. **Composition is the feature.** Stylish and zoomed out, or close and documentary. Never a snapshot.
3. **Real, beautiful, purpose-built modern places:** modern research labs, courtyards, curved halls, data halls, clean rooms, test bays. No stock streets, generic interiors or props.
4. **One bold colour field** from the blue and cool-neutral range, set by light or architecture, with one clear point of focus. People are optional, small and modern.
5. **A touch of surreal, used sparingly** (clouds through server fronts, the moon behind a dish). Always positive and hopeful, never dystopian.

**Shapes:** the real Hedra logo shape or the funnel/wave curve as composition, with strong negative space. Never a made-up H.

**Colour range (29 Oct):** blues and cool neutrals only, so every image feels high-end.
- **Blues:** cobalt, ultramarine, deep navy, ink, cerulean sky, steel blue, ice blue, blue-grey.
- **Cool neutrals:** near-black dark rooms, graphite, slate grey, concrete grey, clean white labs.
- Bold, deep and clean: never faded, washed out, warm-tinted, yellowed or vintage-looking.
- No yellow, ochre, butter, apricot, terracotta, orange, rose, green or sage fields.
- Never add a coral or orange prop as an accent. The warm colours belong in the effect, not the photograph.
- Vary across a set by moving between blues, dark rooms and pale labs, not by leaving the range.

**For a photo that will carry the effect:** give it a clean subject against a plain field (open sky, a seamless wall, a flat floor), with the subject clearly brighter or darker than its background. The effect is built from the subject's own light, so clear separation is what makes it work. A big, bright, clean cerulean sky is the best field found so far (29 Oct): real technology against it, with the sky taking up most of the frame.

**People:** often none: many of the best images are empty architecture and technology. When there is a person, they are small, observed, never posing or looking at the camera, in simple, timeless, quietly elegant clothes (a plain fine-knit jumper, a crisp shirt, a clean overcoat, simple trousers) in black, white, grey or navy. Never hoodies, technical shells, tech-company uniforms or the San Francisco tech-worker look, and never 1960s costume.

**Technology:** Apple, Teenage Engineering or Nothing level. Bead-blasted aluminium, matte graphite, smoked black glass, precise radiused corners, cables dressed along the body, at most one tiny warm indicator light. Show use cases and process, not just server stacks; never a single cabinet alone in a room. Robot arms are a cliché: use them only occasionally. Reach for the wider stack instead: GPU assembly and test, liquid-cooling plant, fibre and networking, power, sensor calibration for world models, autonomous test vehicles, chips and wafers, ground stations, researchers at work.

**Composition:** zoomed out, compression (a long lens stacks something vast behind a small subject), close and documentary, straight down or up, or dissolve (subject crisp, one edge melting into a flat colour field, done in camera, never the face). Always say where the type goes.

**Camera:** Hasselblad 500C/M with Ektachrome E100. Planar 80mm for rooms and documentary moments, Sonnar 150mm or 250mm for compression, Makro-Planar 120mm for hands and details. Near-square (1:1 to 3:4), never 4:5, and never written into the prompt.

**General hero imagery sets a vibe, not an explanation.** For images that represent the company as a whole, the technology is atmosphere: architecture, light, materials and a quiet human moment that feel like a high-end AI research company. Don't stage a specific process the viewer has to decode.

### Three themes for hero imagery

References live in Jack's `Photography/Subjects` folder.

1. **The H arc.** Compositions built from the H mark: two arcs biting in from the top and bottom towards a narrow waist, or a curve that pinches the frame towards the centre (`composition9`–`12`, `composition7`). Find the arcs in real architecture and light: a vault and its reflection, a curved ceiling meeting a curved floor, a band of light pinched between two dark masses. The small subject sits in the waist.
2. **Diffusion, loosely.** Noise resolving into form, used as a quiet metaphor and never as an art installation or a literal pixel effect (`composition1`, `colour2`). Look for it in real, functional things: a fritted glass facade grading from dense dots to clear, mist from a cooling system resolving into cloud, light through a fine perforated screen, frost or condensation clearing from glass. Keep it architectural and abstracted, so the viewer feels it rather than reads it.
3. **Blue-sky optimism.** Real technology in a slightly surreal environment, with sky somewhere in the shot: a dark compute hall ending in one great window of towering cumulus, smoked-glass server fronts reflecting clouds, an oculus over a lab. The technology is real and quiet; the sky carries the hope.

### World watching (29 Oct)

Hedra's models learn the physical world from visuals, so the theme is the feeling of watching the world closely: single, exact moments of physics (water, cloth, gravity, light, wind, people moving), seen from a patient observer's vantage with one clear focal point. Never robots, cameras, screens, tracking or anything that reads as surveillance. Never metaphors. Many have no people; when there are, they are moving through the world, not posing. Uses the main style block.

### The H template (30 Oct)

The composition template for H-mark heroes is a bowtie of light: subjects fill the far left and far right edges, tall at the edges and tapering towards a narrow waist at the centre, with plain dark (or plain sky) above and below the waist. The middle holds nothing big: only a thin line of light, a horizon or a distant vanishing point. Technology on the left, sky and cloud on the right, so the eye travels from one through the narrow centre to the other. The easiest real way to get this is one-point perspective: two long things (a row of cabinets, a cloud bank, a facade, a reflection) receding from the edges to one vanishing point at the centre. Copy the layout of references, never their style. Frame wide (16:9).

**Light, not clouds (30 Oct):** the sky works best as pure light through one small opening (overexposed sky, no detailed clouds), so nothing looks pasted on. That light must physically act on the room: glinting along glass and aluminium, pooling on the floor, rim-lighting edges. Keep the architecture simple and symmetrical. The template's blue band can be the sky's light reflecting along smoked-glass cabinet fronts on both walls, brightest near the centre. People rarely; if used, a tiny silhouette in the light, part of the geometry.

### The model sphere (30 Oct)

The brand graphic for a model is a sphere of off-white dots of varied sizes on near-black. Photographs that partner it show one real sphere made of many points (suspended lights, beads, droplets, bubbles, a seed head, a star cluster), centred, crisp, with generous dark space, in near-black and warm off-white only. Use this block instead of the main one:

```
Style: a real photograph, taken on a Hasselblad 500C/M medium-format camera with Zeiss lenses on Kodak Ektachrome slide film, with the precise, patient eye of a 1960s still-life and science photographer: crisp medium-format detail, a seamless, matte near-black background (close to #141414) that fills most of the frame and runs to every edge, the subject's points of light a clean, warm off-white (close to #F3F1EC), deep inky blacks, gentle film tonality with a soft roll-off in the highlights, and one controlled light. No colour other than near-black and off-white, with at most the faintest cool blue in the deepest shadows. Perfectly centred, symmetrical, calm composition with generous empty dark space around the subject. Real, physical and present-day; nothing CG, illustrated, staged-looking or stock-like. A full-bleed photograph with no border, film rebate or frame. No glow, no haze, no lens flare, no bokeh balls, no added texture, no grain, no text, no logos.
```

**Scene:** two to four sentences: the subject and what is happening, the place, the viewpoint and lens, the light and colour mood (naming the blue or neutral field), and the space for type. Then append the style block in full.

### Style block

```
Style: a real photograph of the world today, taken with the eye of a 1960s architectural photographer, in the manner of Ezra Stoller, on a Hasselblad 500C/M medium-format camera with Zeiss lenses and Kodak Ektachrome slide film: crisp medium-format detail, rich, deep, saturated Ektachrome colour in blues and cool neutral greys, inky blacks, clean whites, gentle film tonality with a soft roll-off in the highlights, a cool neutral white balance, and one dominant directional light with meaningful shadow. Clean and high-end, never faded, washed out, yellowed or warm-cast. Precise, symmetrical, mid-century modernist framing, considered and gently surreal through scale and placement, with generous empty space; most of the frame is one plain block of blue or cool neutral, with no more than three main colours and no yellow, orange, warm or green tones. Everything in front of the camera is present-day: every building, object and piece of technology is real, current, pristine and high-end, in materials such as bead-blasted aluminium, matte white and graphite, smoked glass and polished stone, with precise radiused corners and at most one tiny warm indicator light. Any person is small, observed and never looks at the camera, in simple, timeless, quietly elegant clothes, such as a plain fine-knit jumper, a crisp shirt, a clean overcoat and simple trousers in black, white, grey or navy; never a hoodie, a technical shell, a tech-company uniform or a period costume. Positive, calm and optimistic. Nothing staged, CG, illustrated or stock-like. A full-bleed photograph that runs to every edge of the frame, with no border, film rebate or frame. No added texture, no painterly effect, no grain, no text, no logos.
```

## The effect: the Meadow palette

The effect re-prints part of the photograph in five colours, mapped to its light: the darkest tones take the first colour and the brightest take the last. The colours are deliberately **muted and calm**, never harsh. Brightness comes from an **iridescent sheen** layered on top, not from louder colours.

### The palettes

Every effect uses one of these six palettes, colours listed darkest to lightest. They're the same six as in the Hedra Brand tool. These are the only effect colours; don't invent others.

| Palette | Deep | Mid | Light | Body | Top | Feel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Meadow** | #1E2426 | #2F4A63 | #1F90C0 | #4EC075 | #F28DB2 | cerulean, green, pink: the original |
| **Meadow coral** | #212229 | #3D4666 | #6A78CD | #EE8266 | #C6EC72 | soft violet, coral, soft volt |
| **Meadow volt** | #1E2427 | #334965 | #677AC8 | #B1DD60 | #F8907F | soft violet, volt-green, coral |
| **Meadow violet** | #222229 | #444367 | #797DCD | #EC7C99 | #C6EC72 | violet, pink, soft volt |
| **Meadow sky** | #1E2426 | #2E4B63 | #3A8FC0 | #EE8266 | #C6EC72 | blue, coral, soft volt |
| **Silver** | #16181D | #3A3F4B | #7A8294 | #B9BFCB | #EEF0F4 | monochrome metal |

**Why they feel calm** (keep to these levels if a palette is ever added): the deepest colour is a soft charcoal rather than black, and the second is a muted slate. The three brightest colours sit at moderate saturation, climbing evenly in lightness. The coral, volt and violet are the brand colours softened to those same levels. Full-strength brand colours (#FF6740, #E9FE14, #5657FE) are too harsh for the effect.

**Choosing a palette:**
- The photographs are now all blue or cool neutral, so the effect is where the warmth comes from. Meadow coral and Meadow sky contrast best with blue fields; Meadow violet and Meadow volt suit grey and dark rooms.
- Vary palettes across a set.
- Use Silver on monochrome or metallic subjects.

### Rules for every effect prompt

- **Give hex values.** Never write "brand colour", "neon", "fluorescent", "thermal", "heat", "fire", "artistic", "paint" or "brush". Describe the colour as a printed colour map, not as light or heat.
- **Restraint:** on a still, the effect covers no more than about 20–30% of the image, and the rest stays perfectly photographic.
- **Never on a face.** The face, eyes and skin of a person stay photographic.
- **The texture comes from the photo.** It is the subject's own light re-printed; never a pattern, grid or overlay laid on top.
- **Crisp, flat and printed.** No glow, haze, smoke, particles, drips or soft blur.
- **One palette per image.**

### Speckle (default: a texture on the image)

The subject's light is re-printed as a smooth five-colour map, with every detail still readable. Sparse, random specks of the neighbouring colours are scattered over it, slightly clumped like printed grain, and a few specks jump one colour further, which gives a faint iridescent flicker. Up close it reads as a textile or sandy texture you can't quite name. From a distance it reads as an iridescent, colour-mapped photograph.

**In GPT Image** (the example uses Meadow sky; for another palette, swap the five hex values in order):

```
Image 1 is the base photograph. Keep it exactly as it is, except for its main subject, which is re-printed as a fine, speckled colour map, like a print made with a stochastic screen.

Placement: only the main subject (the brightest, most prominent object or structure), following its own outline and light. It covers no more than a quarter of the whole image. Everything else, including the background, stays perfectly photographic and untouched. If there is a person, their face, eyes and skin stay completely photographic.

Colour map: the subject's own tones are re-mapped, darkest to lightest, through exactly these five colours: charcoal #1E2426, slate #2E4B63, blue #3A8FC0, coral #EE8266, soft lime #C6EC72. The map is smooth, and every detail, edge and texture of the subject stays fully readable, like a precise gradient-map print. Over it, sparse, tiny, random specks of the neighbouring colours are scattered, one to two pixels across, slightly clumped like the grain of a printed photograph: lighter specks in the darker areas and darker specks in the lighter ones, with a few specks one colour further along, which gives a faint pearly, iridescent flicker. The colours are muted and calm, with a gentle iridescent sheen across the mid-tones.

Finish: crisp, flat and printed, like a fine screen print on matte paper. No regular dot grid, no square pixels, no glow, no haze, no blur, no particles, no paint. Keep image 1 exactly as it is everywhere else. No text, no logos.
```

**Subtle version:** add `The colour map is laid over the photograph at about half strength, so the subject's own colour still shows through.`

### Bleed (the subject bleeding off the image, like a printing error)

Benchmarks: Jack's two references.
- **Cloud:** the right half of a towering cloud is cut by a vertical line and re-printed in coral, periwinkle and mint, with crisp coloured streaks running straight up off it.
- **Hands:** the backs of two hands framing the sky are re-printed, with ribbons of streaks flowing out behind each wrist.

How it works:
- **A hard straight cut** runs across the subject. On one side the subject is re-printed in the palette with full detail. On the other it stays a normal photograph. The cut is what makes it read as a printing mistake.
- **Crisp streaks** leave the re-printed edge. Each one is a thin strip holding a single colour from the point where it leaves the subject, so they form many parallel, hard-edged strips with ragged ends. They are never blurred, glowing or smoky.
- **Print errors:** a thin bright rim where the cut meets the image, a few rows shifted slightly out of line, and fine print grain inside the streaks.

**Straight** (in GPT Image, example in Meadow sky):

```
Image 1 is the base photograph. Keep it exactly as it is, except for one part of its main subject, which bleeds out of the photograph like a printing error.

The cut: one perfectly straight, vertical cut runs through the main subject. On one side of the cut the subject is unchanged and fully photographic. On the other side the subject's own image is re-printed as a colour map, darkest to lightest, through exactly these five colours: charcoal #1E2426, slate #2E4B63, blue #3A8FC0, coral #EE8266, soft lime #C6EC72. Every detail, edge and texture stays fully readable within the colour map. A thin, bright rim of soft lime runs along where the re-printed subject meets the background.

The bleed: from the re-printed side, the subject's colours are dragged straight upwards out of it into the open space, as many thin, crisp, perfectly parallel strips, each one a single flat colour taken from where it leaves the subject, with hard edges between strips. The strips are of uneven lengths, with ragged ends, and fade out over a distance about as large as the subject. A few thin horizontal rows across the strips are shifted slightly sideways, like a misregistered scan, and a fine print grain sits within them.

Finish: crisp, flat and printed, like an image dragged across a scanner or a screen print gone wrong. It covers no more than about a third of the image. It never looks like light, glow, smoke, fire, motion blur or paint. If there is a person, their face, eyes and skin stay completely photographic. Keep image 1 exactly as it is everywhere else. No text, no logos.
```

**Ribbons:** for flowing streaks, as in the hands reference, replace the paragraph starting `The bleed:` with:

```
The bleed: from the re-printed side, the subject's colours are dragged out of it, away from the subject, as many thin, crisp, parallel strips, each one a single flat colour taken from where it leaves the subject. Close to the subject the strips are straight and tightly packed; further away they bend together into long, smooth, flowing waves, like ribbons pulled through water, always staying parallel to each other. They are of uneven lengths, with ragged ends, and fade out over a distance one to two times the size of the subject. A few strips near the subject are shifted slightly sideways, like a misregistered scan, with a fine print grain within them.
```

**Direction:** change "straight upwards" (or "away from the subject") to suit the image. Streaks should run into open space, never back across the subject or a face.

### Iridescence and strength

- **Brighter:** add `The colours carry a strong iridescent, pearlescent sheen that shifts across the mid-tones, like oil on water, while staying printed and flat.` This is the only way to brighten the effect. Never swap in brighter hex values.
- **Quieter:** add `The colour map covers only the subject's highlights; its shadows keep their natural photographic colour.`

## Review

**Reject photographs that are:**
- Dystopian or bleak.
- Server-rack defaults, or a lone cabinet in a room.
- Built on invented props or buildings.
- CG, stage-like, posed or stock.
- Showing any 1960s styling on people, or people in hoodies, technical shells or tech-worker uniforms.
- Showing dated, battered or all-white plastic tech.
- Outside the blue and cool-neutral range: yellow, ochre, orange, green or other warm fields.
- Faded, washed out, warm-cast or vintage in colour. They should look high-end.

**Reject effects that:**
- Glow, smoke, blur or look like fire or light.
- Read as a dot grid, square pixels or a pattern laid on top.
- Use colours outside the chosen palette, or flat full-strength brand colours.
- Lose the subject's detail.
- Cover more than about a third of the image.
- Touch a face.
- Spread the bleed in every direction instead of one.

When revising, apply one note at a time, and never let a new note rewrite the whole brief.