About
For the lamplit photographer.
Some photographers have a lighting truck. Most of us have a couple of speedlights, a hard drive that’s too full, and a Saturday wedding that needs delivering by Monday. Lamplit is for us — card to keepers, on your machine, with your eye making every pick.
Who built it
Two people. One writes the software; one shoots for a living in Seattle and has been the harshest user of every build. No team page, because there is no team.
That is why the app is shaped the way it is. Features get built because a photographer hit a real wall on a real job, not because they filled a gap on a comparison chart. Capture-time sync exists because a second shooter’s clock was twenty minutes out. Ingest that can check every copy against a hash exists because of the specific fear you feel formatting a card.
Why it exists
The tool that solved culling properly did so twenty years ago, and it is still the right answer for a lot of people — we say so on the comparison page. But it costs what an institution pays, and it looks like the decade it was designed in.
The new generation wants to make the picks for you. No AI picks. Your taste is the product. If a machine chooses your frames, the thing you are selling — judgement — stops being yours.
Lamplit is the third option: the same loop, a modern interface, at a price a working photographer does not have to think about.
What we won’t do
- Publish a speed number we haven’t measured. There is a benchmark harness in the codebase and no published results yet. When there are, they arrive with the method attached and you will be able to run it yourself.
- Write a testimonial nobody said. There are none on this site because there are none yet. The component is built and sitting unused until a beta user says something real, with their name on it.
- Claim a feature we don’t have. Every page here lists what is missing next to what isn’t — no collections, no histogram, no contact sheets, JPEG-only export.
- Describe a competitor from memory. Every factual claim about another product on this site was read off their own live site, carries the date we read it, and links back.
Photographers talk to each other constantly — you hire each other as second shooters and compare notes on every job. One caught overclaim would follow this brand around forever. Candour is not a virtue here so much as arithmetic.
Where it is right now
Early access. The app has a 14-day trial and takes licence keys, but there is no checkout on this site yet, so there is no way to pay us. Downloads are paused while a new build is published. The download page has the honest status and the pricing page says what it will cost when there is something to sell.
If you shoot for a living and want in early, leave an address — that is the whole of the process.
Photograph — the studio
Shot at the brother's Seattle studio. Dark room, one photographer at a desk, face lit by the screen. No stock imagery, no models.
Photograph — real work, credited
A frame from a real job, with the photographer's name and business on it. The photos inside every screenshot on this site should come from here too.
Come and break it on a real job.
The beta is small on purpose. If you shoot volume and have a card that nothing else handles well, you are exactly who we want.
We’ll email you when Lamplit can be downloaded, and about your trial. Product news only if you tick the box and confirm. No list sharing, ever.