AI and the effect on photography.....

A couple of weeks ago I saw a 'reel' which popped up my phone. Nothing unusual in that, but this particular one really got me thinking about my passion for photography. It opened with a girl holding a camera and pleading with her boyfriend to get out of the house with her to create some images in a style she had liked. His reply was to tell her that she didn't need to go out to create them, she could use some particular app or programme to create them virtually, showing her how she could. As a photographer, I was appalled. Where's the skill and above all where is the human element in all of this?

I love photography! I love the 'process' of taking photographs: being out in the field, looking for compositions, exploring new locations and coping with changing weather and light. The challenge of finding something visually interesting. I have always loved the natural world and soaking in the joy of the great outdoors. Although I would always prefer to be out taking images, I also enjoy going through the images and the 'post' process and this is where the dilemma's with the use of digital photography starts to create difficulties. They are a record of a moment, which might only be my record, but a reminder of effort, being out and hopefully rising to the challenge of creating something that I, and hopefully others will find interesting and visually stimulating. In essence, trying to convey a feeling: An emotion.

This image taken at sunset from nigh on the top of Stac Pollaidh in the Scottish Highlands, involved a long, steep walk. I felt alone and actually quite vulnerable in the remoteness of this stunning landscape, having passed only 2 walkers as I headed up to this point and they were heading down. I suspect that I was the only person on that mountain when I took this, so I was aware of the relative scarcity of images taken up there at sunset and also there was a lot of physical effort to obtain this image. My walk back down was, for the most part in the pitch black of a moonless sky and felt pretty sketchy. Startled by a large Red Deer that I couldn't see until it almost ran me over certainly frightened me and I can't deny that I was grateful to get back to my van in the dark of a March night. BUT, I look at this image and it feels really special: the effort to get it, the fact that I was almost certainly the only person up there at that time and also the complete solitude. There were fears of falling in the dark that were very real to me, so the resulting photograph is just as important as all the feelings I had at the time and the memory of the exertions and adventure it took to create the image itself. All in all, the main reasons I love landscape photography.

The program that I use to process my images has a huge amount of 'processing' capability. If I wanted to, I can take the image I took and make it look fundementally different and convey a completely different sense of the moment it was taken, albeit that the scene would still be as it appeared to me at the time in its basic form. I recently took an image of the moon rising here in East Devon. Whilst the moon colour is pretty accurately rendered in the image, I processed it by making everything but the moon a monochrome image. I took that decision in post processing, but I am sure that some of the tools that allowed me to do it are in fact linked to AI.

The image is the scene as I saw it, but the creative element (of only having the moon in colour and the rest in black and white) means that I have altered this image to a degree. I haven't however removed any of the landscape or added anything in. For me, that is how I expected to process the image in my mind as I took it, but it does beg the question of is it real?

This manipulation of imagery is nothing new. Over many years, photographers have used techniques to enhance or even change images significantly, even when using 'film'. The tools might be different, but the result is the same: an interpretation of a scene!

I view this level of manipulation to to be acceptable. Maybe there is a place for some AI nonsense to create an totally fictitious image from scratch but for me it will never replace the joy of being out there and actually seeing it for myself. Pushing myself to visit remote and wild places, seeing waves crash over rocks in the eye of a storm front battering the cornish coast or even feeling the anticipation when my alarm rouses me at 3 am to get to a location to see the sun rise, while the rest of the world sleeps.

No 'App' will ever replace that, but it might diminish the results I put the effort in to create....Lets hope not too much eh? There should be some sense of reality and our connection to the natural world.

This image (above)was as I took it....straight off the camera

And this is the image after it's had some work in lightroom....much more to my taste and certainly has a greater impact than the Raw image which came off the camera

To be continued shortly and my musings and worries about AI