AI for Photographers is the Steroids for Athletes, Win that comes at a cost
Art is subjective and artificial intelligence is taught to be dealt in absolutes
I have had it till here (I put my hand to my temple) with the AI talk.
It is more so the constant chatter of AI in art forms like photography, music, and videography.
If you are wondering then yes, I saw the latest Google event and their latest feature that allows Gemini (Google’s version of GenAI) to completely alter the essence of a photo to represent something else. I immediately asked myself -
Who is this feature aimed at?
My Photography is devoid of AI
A complaint I never hear anyone aim at me or any real photographer.
Many have called my photography “nice”, “it works”, and “improving” and for lack of a better word on their part, it has been also referred to as “Hmm”.
These are the accolades I accept for my photography, wear them proudly as a badge if I could turn them in and find a valid reason for it.
One word I don’t accept is “perfect”. I don’t think anything we do is ever perfect, especially an art form but calling someone’s photography “perfect” is a sucker punch to the gut of the photographer. To follow it up with something like -
“Use some AI to make it perfect” is the ultimate slap-on-the-wrist insult to any creator.
Yet here we are, in this age of AI, thrusting Generative AI to make our art look perfect for a reason none of us are truly aware of but find it necessary to fit in with the technological advancement the world is going through and so shall we, just by association.
The fear of being left behind is haunting and the technological giants are feeling it. They are making us feel it too.
While I work my day job in the tech world, managing the raw materials for the very AI that is everywhere in the world, I have my photography as an escape to the real world and I refuse to taint it with AI.
The world is not perfect and a photo is a perspective of a photographer that is very personal to each one of us. It should be represented as is.
The perfectly imperfect representation of the real world
Here are some of the latest shots from my Fujifilm X-E4 from my last travels to a magical place called Hallstatt, Austria.
The not-so-Ripley’s Believe it or Not trivia here is that it took me a day and a half of early sunrise and late sunset hikes to click these pictures.
My camera of choice is the only camera I have, a Fujifilm X-E4 with an 18-55mm Fujinon lens is my trusted companion through daytime as well as nighttime photography.
The nighttime shots take varied Exposure times between 1/2 to 1/60 to get the trailing effect of light and the ambient feel. The F-stop is between f/3.6 to f/4 which provides a perfect frame.
The daytime shots take an F-stop of f/9 and exposure times of 1/640 for the landscape shot of the town overlooking the hills.
Post Processing to the win
I have spent hours understanding Photoshop. It was such a waste of time.
The hours spent understanding Photoshop could have been spent working with the Fujifilm camera and learning all the nuances of my lenses. I am not saying post-processing is entirely useless but for me, post-processing in photography should be used to enhance the perspective than to reimagine the photo.
Enough about Photoshop, I almost exclusively used Adobe Lightroom for touch-ups on my photos. I adjusted the exposure, and vignette to enhance the perspective to tell the story I want to tell through my photo.
The Switch to Affinity Photos2
The pictures I managed to grab during the pride parade in Munich were amazing to edit. I took the opportunity to take my newly acquired post-processing software out for a ride.
I recently switched to Affinity Photo2 for my processing needs and it was quite a change and needed to get used to it.
The main reason to switch was the AI nonsense that Adobe kept pushing and I was having none of it.
Affinity Photo2 works differently than Lightroom. It is Lightroom and Photoshop blended and differentiated in the app with the use of personas. I never managed to use the Photoshop persona of the app and was happy with regular touch-ups like highlights and enhancing color for the pride parade above.
I was being cautious not to overdo it to make it look nauseating. I think I got the balance right.
Smartphones do it all in seconds, why bother?
Finally, to the point of my post. AI in our phones and upcoming flagship Pro phones does all of the above in seconds for every person with a phone then why do photographers bother with it at all?
The answer is subjective and not to belittle the iPhone photographers’ community but to tell a story with images, or any story in general, you need the right tools and process. Emphasis on the process part.
I am very intrigued to learn about the process of each photographer and how it might seem similar yet manage to capture and tell a different story altogether.
For me, it is very common to capture the image, it might be rushed or a well-thought-of frame but when I sit to process it for print or digital, I tend to find something entirely new that I missed while clicking. Sometimes, it changes the story I want to tell with the image I clicked.
The argument is AI can make this better and faster, isn’t it?
The advancement in AI, Gen AI, is aiming to change the essence of photography by changing the image, and its particulars like landscape entirely what it was while capturing. This is not post-processing but it is a digital regeneration of the image entirely from scratch.
Smartphone cameras are also changing the way we click images, so much so that the subject may appear and disappear while the image is clicked. From an artistic point of view, this is intriguing and setting a dangerous precedent all at once.
It seems like a slippery slope for photographers where the art form in itself is evolving and sooner than later it will creep into their tooling.
I don’t know about a common consensus on this but I want to tell a story that is captured by the camera rather than what the processor stitches into the image I capture.
Conclusion
Why Am I so pessimistic about the AI in our phones?
The simple answer is, I know how the programmers and developers are using it and it rarely adds any more value than what the forum websites did in the past. The fact that AI is pushed into creator circles is further evidence of the dumbing down of highly skilled individuals in their profession to a level where we are all tech-dependent and incapable of creative imagination.
AI and tech might be unavoidable for us all but it is up to us to make sure how we let it in our daily lives and professions.
What do you think?
This article hits the nail on the head Vaibhav Kalekar , Well Written :-)
It's voicing the exact dilemma that's keeping many photographers up