+ 12

Text description provided by the architects. This photography studio is located on the fifth and sixth floors of a small six-story building. It can be rented for seasonal apparel brand looks, product photography with models for e-commerce sites, and exhibitions. As a result of its purpose, most of the space is taken up by plain white walls, wooden walls, white ceilings, and simple concrete floors, which are needed by many users.

The challenge was how to create a unique photo spot just by this studio within that situation. The fifth floor features a concrete staircase and a concrete box that encases the elevator. The staircase itself has been polished to reveal the encapsulated gravel. By designing an irregular stonework sculptural staircase amidst the orderly white walls and concrete floor, the staircase becomes more than just a means of transportation – it becomes a stay that accentuates the clothes, shoes, and models.

As a photography studio, the sixth floor’s flat shape inevitably created some dead space. Rather than utilizing the dead space for storage of photographic equipment and furniture, a distorted glass panel with a mirrored surface was installed to reach the full 4.4-meter ceiling, resulting in a completely new and unique visual effect.

The potential for using these distorted mirrors to create unique and original photographs will be left to the creativity of the photographers and art directors who utilize this studio. By introducing an unexpected feature into the studio space, I hope to stimulate the creativity of the creators who use it, and that they will produce exceptional photographic works that go beyond the original intent of the designer.

A researcher has used ultraviolet (UV) photography to locate a lost fragment of Biblical text nearly 1,500 years after it was originally written. UV photography equipment has looked beyond layers of text to find a “new” ancient translation of the Gospels.

As reported by Popular Mechanics, medievalist Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered the hidden text beneath layers of other text.

This is called a double palimpsest, meaning Kessel uncovered traces of original text beneath two layers of writing that had been effaced to create room for a later third layer of text.

Kessel’s findings have been published in the journal New Testament Studies. His discovery is one of the earliest translations of the Gospels.

Some publications report that Kessel has found a “hidden chapter,” but it’s more accurate to say that Kessel uncovered a new translation of an existing chapter. In this case, it’s an ancient translation of Matthew chapter 12.

The traces Kessel found are part of what’s known as the Old Syriac translations. The translation is believed to have been written in the third century and then copied hundreds of years later in the sixth century. Roughly 1,300 years ago, a scribe in modern-day Palestine erased the translation to reuse it, as parchment was an exceedingly rare commodity.

“The tradition of Syriac Christianity knows several translations of the Old and New Testaments. Until recently, only two manuscripts were known to contain the Old Syriac translation of the gospels,” says Kessel. One of the manuscripts is kept in the British Library in London, while he discovered the other in St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai while working on his “Sinai Palimpsests Project.”

The fragment that Kessel uncovered is believed to be only the fourth manuscript that “attests to the Old Syriac version,” the press release states.

The newly-discovered text offers a different interpretation of the Gospels. The original Greek of Matthew chapter 12, verse 1, says, “At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; and his disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat.” The Syriac translation Kessel located instead says, “[…] began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them.”

The translation Kessel located was written at least a century before the oldest surviving Greek manuscripts.

“Grigory Kessel has made a great discovery thanks to his profound knowledge of old Syriac texts and script characteristics,” says Claudia Rapp, director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Kessel’s use of ultraviolet photography to uncover erased texts is common in the process of digitally recovering palimpsests. A. Nemeth writes for The Vatican Library, “In the context of palimpsests, the use of ultraviolet light is the most widespread method.”

Nemeth continues, “Today, multispectral photography offers the best solution for enhancing the difference between faded inks and their surrounding areas. To do so, it utilizes multiple numbers of images taken from the same page and captured in the same position while being illuminated by a pre-set succession of fixed wavelengths of light. These images capture the different reactions of the parchment to different light waves, which can be compared fruitfully.”

Digital photography techniques uncover previously invisible bits of erased text and allow researchers like Kessel to investigate ancient documents safely.

“This discovery proves how productive and important the interplay between modern digital technologies and basic research can be when dealing with medieval manuscripts,” Rapp says.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

… restaurants always boast about the fresh catch of the day when touting their sea food … then there are those who actually catch their own on a daily basis, like our Western Grebe in the photo above. It is a tad on the large size for him as he swallows the fish whole fish head first (dorsal fins are a one way trip.) It was only moments before he had the fish down and on he went in search of more. I love the red eyes and the tufted hat he was wearing. Grebes spend almost their entire life on the water … they have evolved as incredible swimmers and as a result their feet are the very far back of their body so that they can barely walk on land.

Kingfishers are a very difficult bird to get whether on land or water. Once in a while, one of them will hang around and let you in close. This one played with us for about ten minutes the other day, flitting between branches of trees in a back bay, but staying close for great shooting … the perfect opportunity to get photos of them in flight … a small tough target to shoot.

Into yet another day which will be filled with wonder … not sure what, but it will be a day filled with opportunities and choices … choose well, have a fabulous day and smile at those you meet and greet!

Cheers,

Ted

I bring but this one common thought
My life has wrought;
That from the dregs of drear despair
Still every where
There is a joy I yet may sip—
‘Tis comradeship
With all mankind, the high and low
I know.

excerpt from I Know by Max Ehrmann

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The easiest way to reach Mr. Grussing is by email: ted@tedgrussing.com

In addition to sales of photographs already taken Ted does special shoots for patrons on request and also does air-to-air photography for those who want photographs of their airplanes in flight. All special photographic sessions are billed on an hourly basis.

Ted also does one-on-one workshops for those interested in learning the techniques he uses.  By special arrangement Ted will do one-on-one aerial photography workshops which will include actual photo sessions in the air.

More about Ted Grussing …

Lens filters are one of the most affordable yet also most versatile accessories you can stow in your lens bag. Some of them, like polarizers and UV filters, are practically ubiquitous in modern-day photography, used both to lend images a unique look as well as to protect your costly gear.

But one particular lens filter is only rarely talked about these days: the humble color filter.

Today, let’s rectify that. By analyzing not just what color filters are and how they work, but what has affected their greatly changing popularity over the years, it’s easy to determine how color filters may fit into your creative process, too!

Table of Contents

Identifying a Color Filter

Hold a color filter in your hand, and two things are likely to stick out to the naked eye right away. The first is the intensity and clarity of the solid color it radiates. Punchy, strong contrasts that are very aesthetically pleasing are the hallmark of a high-quality color filter.

The second is the physical similarity between color filters and any of the other lens filters you might already be familiar with. Color filters use the same filter threads and the same construction as any other lens-mounted, circular filter.

The only difference is the way the glass surface is treated to achieve the desired effect, making the learning curve for those experienced in using filters practically zero.

What are Color Filters Used For?

This raises the question: why should you use color filters?

The answer is a bit complex (I would not have written a whole guide about it if it wasn’t), but in a nutshell, color filters are there to help you control contrasts and light balance in monochrome photography.

If applied to color photography, the color filter will do something very simple indeed: shooting with a red filter will paint your whole frame red, shooting with a green filter will make everything in your viewfinder appear green, and so on.

But it is in monochrome photography that color filters can really do something unique and interesting.

How Color Filters Work

Let’s take a moment to see how color filters do what they do to our images.

In black-and-white photography, the colors of the world around us may be expressed in terms of gradients of grays and blacks and whites.

But that does not mean that our lens or even our film does not “see” color! It is merely the spectrum within which the colors are represented that differs from “color photography”.

Hence, when applying a color filter (say, red), that color is literally filtered out, darkening all parts of the image containing that color since it will be less exposed. This allows the neighboring colors on the color wheel to pop out more.

At the same time, the color filter’s complementary colors (for red, that would be green) will also be darkened, if not by as much.

Since all color filters remove at least part of the spectrum from the image, they also act like sunglasses for your lens, removing reflections and certain unsightly optical effects. This is most apparent when shooting in bright sunlight.

The Whole Palette of Color Filters Available Today

Let us take a closer look at each of the color filters for black-and-white photography commonly employed today, and how their effects translate to the final image.

Yellow Filters

The yellow filter is by far the most common color filter in monochromatic photography. In fact, it has been considered the standard filter to use since the early days of the medium, and most young photographers were trained during the last century to keep a yellow filter on their lenses by default.

Why is that? In simple words, it’s because the yellow filter affects your image in subtle ways that are more often welcomed than not, making it fairly universal.

Yellow cuts through small mist or fog relatively easily, clearing up the frame a little. It also increases the contrast between clouds and the sky, helping prevent that overblown “whiteout” look that you can get on a bright day.

Furthermore, many people find medium and light skin tones look more pleasing through a yellow filter, which helps in portraiture.

Green Filters

A landscape photographer’s perennial favorite, green cuts through the muddiness that often results from shooting wide, open areas covered in thick foliage. By filtering out large parts of the green spectrum, it allows contrasts between leaves, flowers, trees, and other natural elements to stand out more, making them more crisp and three-dimensional in appearance.

Red Filters

Red filters create a similar effect to yellow filters, though the results may look much more intense. Like yellow, filtering red separates clouds from the sky. However, red filters do more than just add a subtle layer of contrast – on a bright day, the blue sky will show in your photo as near-black while clouds stand out in punchy shades of dark gray!

Patterns, such as the texture of brick tiles in architecture or the fine details of skin, look much grittier and more detailed through a red filter. This is often employed to lend photos a “weathered”, rough look.

Also like yellow, red cuts through fog, mist, and thin cloud layers. However, it does so much more potently, allowing the red filter to eliminate almost all forms of atmospheric haze from the picture and clearing up distant scenes to a significant degree.

Orange Filters

Orange filters are neither as common as red nor as yellow, but they present a neat middle ground between the two.

Not as intense as the former but much more noticeable than the latter, they are especially useful for balancing out certain skin tones. They also render more interesting details and contrasts in light-colored organic subjects, such as flowers and other plants where a stronger green filter would darken too much of the frame.

Blue Filters

Even less common is the blue filter. This filter essentially does the opposite of the red filter – its effect is about as potent, yet instead of cutting through fog and sharpening textures, it appears to smooth out color gradients and bring out haze and mist more.

While rare, blue filters can be useful if you are dealing with an overblown scene and you wish to bring down the contrast to let certain details stand out more.

Special-Purpose Colors

Beyond these “standard” color filters, there are many more options that are rarely discussed. Given enough time and diligence, you can probably manage to find at least one color filter for every named shade of the visible light spectrum!

However, that doesn’t mean that every single color filter imaginable will do something aesthetically preferable to your image.

Most rare and unusual color filters for monochrome photography will state relatively clearly on their packaging what precise use case they are intended for.

To name just one example I am familiar with, the French brand FOCA made a special brownish filter called the “DYMA” for their own cameras. Its color profile absorbs roughly the same spectrum as a yellow and green filter combined (though slightly less intensely than either), making it an ideal solution for landscape scenes heavy in flora.

Color Filter Factors

Do note that not every color filter is created equal. I am not just talking about obvious issues of quality from off-brand gear, but rather about something called the filter factor.

Every color filter will display a small factor labeled “X”, followed by a number. This is usually found on the rim of the filter, and the number indicates the factor of exposure lost.

Because color filters literally remove light from your image, you do need to adjust exposure accordingly. The filter factor helps you determine the amount of extra light you need to push through your lens to achieve the same exposure as without the filter.

Note that filters with stronger effects, such as green and red, will naturally remove more light than more subtle filters and thus carry a higher filter factor.

Thankfully, most modern cameras are perfectly capable of compensating for this automatically by using TTL light metering. Still, it’s handy to know about filter factors to be able to do quick exposure estimations in your head when need be.

Wratten Numbers for Color Filters

There is one more way in which color filters differ from one another, even two of the same color!

That is because there is no universal standard on, for instance, the shade of green that is considered appropriate for a green filter to have.

Rather, all filters come in many different shades, or intensities, and it is up to you to choose which to use! When I mentioned yellow as the long-running standard for black-and-white photography earlier, I was referring to one specific yellow: Wratten 8, also commonly referred to as K2 in the K series of Wratten numbers designed for use with tungsten light sources.

What does 8 or K2 mean? Well, if you look them up, an 8 or K2 filter is called “Medium Yellow”. This is a standardized definition based on something called Wratten codes, or Wratten numbers.

Patented originally by Kodak for their own lens filters, Wratten numbers have become the global baseline by which all shades of color filters are still measured. Because Kodak doesn’t make the original Wratten filters anymore, it is up to third-party manufacturers to adhere to the Wratten codes – and not all do, especially low-priced brands.

But generally speaking, you can still take the original Wratten designations for color filters as a guideline to understand how different shades of the same color filter will act differently.

Should You Use Color Filters In-Camera or in Post-Processing?

While simply screwing a filter of a color of your choice to the front of your lens will allow color filtering to be done in-camera, that is nowadays but one way of compensating for color contrasts in monochrome photography.

The power of digital post-processing enables us to do much of what physical color filters do in software instead of hardware. All you have to do is jump into the suite of your choice and edit the color balance of your photograph. Usually, the program will give you a few different ways of doing this, for example via sliders, or by adjusting color curves.

Some post-processing software even comes with its own color filters built-in! Select “red”, for instance, and the program will automatically filter out exactly the parts of the spectrum that a physical red lens filter would.

This has a few clear advantages over mounting filters on the lens. Digital photo editing is mostly non-destructive – you can play with the effects of different color filters, redo and undo them, and pick the one you like most.

That is especially the case when shooting RAW files, which give you much higher editing headroom than JPEGs.

By and large, skillful use of post-processing software can very closely emulate the effects of on-lens color filters.

This isn’t actually even a modern innovation per se. Already in the film era, using color filters in the darkroom when printing could, if done properly, closely recreate the effects of lens filters without having to alter the original negative.

In the end, that makes the question of whether to use color filters in-camera or in post-processing one of user preference. Some might argue that on-lens filters provide a more reliable experience – as long as you are somewhat familiar with the factor and Wratten number of your filter, you can predict what the image is going to turn out like.

On the other hand, others might appreciate the freedom of experimenting with the countless options and endless leeway for fine-tuning that modern photo editing provides.

Image credits: Header photo from Depositphotos

In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot finally succeeded in producing a crude photograph of his country estate. He triumphantly declared that his was the first house ever known to have drawn its own picture. Fox Talbot described the calotype, his contribution to the photomechanical process, as an eradication of human intervention. In Talbot’s description, the photogenic drawing was formed “by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper.” Photography offered nature a “pencil” with which to render herself via optical and chemical means alone. 

Fox Talbot’s self-drawing house is a useful reminder that the development of the photograph is an automation story. By the mid-nineteenth century, rendering a detailed image no longer needed to be outsourced to a draftsman because the process could be completed instantly with a camera. Proponents of the technology emphasized that not only was photography more precise than the human hand — it was faster and cheaper. 

The elimination of human fallibility was one of photography’s biggest selling points, but this prompted passionate debates about the new medium’s implications for visual culture. Could images made largely by a machine be considered art? If so, where did human creativity fit in this process? 

The answer, negotiated after a century of messy non-consensus, established photography as a form of objective mechanical documentation and creative human expression simultaneously. It embodied two conflicting approaches. One determined that authorship of an image existed largely on the ends — in the framing of an image and its development — but the camera filled in the rest. The other maintained that photography was influenced by a human operator at every step, representing a creative process akin to drawing with light. While the second argument helped photography secure copyright protections, it was the first that made the medium compatible with an industrializing Europe and drove its commercial proliferation.

As the twenty-first century becomes increasingly automated, attempts to pinpoint where human agency exists in a technologically mediated process grow more frantic. Images generated with artificial intelligence by companies like OpenAI and Stablilty.ai are spurring questions remarkably like those that emerged with the advent of the photograph. By typing a sentence into the equivalent of Google search, users can generate “new” images compiled from images scraped across the internet, some mysteriously and others dubiously. The result has been a flood of AI-generated images in places previously exclusive to human authors. Painting competitions, commercial graphic design and the genre of portraiture have all since collided with the technology in troubling ways. 

The fine arts were thought to be a final hold-out of mortal inventiveness, but the surprising quality of AI-generated images is prompting deeper questions about the nature of human creativity. How can you automate a process that is itself indicative of human expression? A lawsuit filed early this year against Stability AI hinges on whether originality is exclusive to human creators. Adjusting copyright law to address this issue will likely have a tremendous impact on creative economies. If the history of the photograph tells us anything, it’s that the debate won’t be settled quickly, straightforwardly or by the institutions we typically associate with cultural gatekeeping. The process will, however, tell us a lot about the cultural conditions that help us make sense of emergent technologies. 

Photography As Both Art & Document

Trust in a camera’s ability to produce objective pictures was built up over the nineteenth century by emphasizing the technology’s externality to human subjectivity. Fox Talbot celebrated his estate’s ability to draw itself because it removed human interpretation. His French contemporaries, Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce — with equally solid claims to the invention of the medium — insisted on the elimination of the draftsman as a critical step in the “fixing” of nature’s visual expressions.

An existing literature in the history of science traces how the development of the photograph helped negotiate “objectivity” as a neutral conceptual category. In nineteenth-century science, photographs of biological and anatomical samples displaced illustrations as a more trustworthy form of visualization, even if they were less clear. Photographs could be fuzzier and more visually ambiguous than hand-made illustrations, but their mechanical nature helped them circulate as comparatively more reliable. 

Framing photography as distinctly outside the realm of human fallibility was one of the technology’s biggest selling points. The maintenance of this idea, however, prompted difficult questions about attribution. If a photograph was truly an automated form of draftsmanship, could photographers be thought of as artists? The production of a photograph certainly couldn’t happen without human operators, but could they be considered a creator more than someone using a machine in a factory? 

As with AI-generated artworks, the “automation” of draftsmanship prompted new ways of thinking about authorship. One early contender for photography’s true author was light itself, acting autonomously on behalf of the sun. An early form of the technology invented by Niépce in 1826 required a full day of exposure to the sun and was thus coined “heliography,” or “sun writing.” English art critic Elizabeth Eastlake, describing the emergent genre in the 1830s, referred to photographic tools collectively as a type of “solar pencil,” using light to draw upon the camera’s lens. This was decried — but not contradicted — during the Salon of 1859, when the interminably grumpy French critic Charles Baudelaire skewered photography as a form of fanatical sun-worship.

Baudelaire’s 1859 rebuke indicates that the presumed objectivity of a photograph was not yet recognized as a universal value. He mocked French aristocrats who believed that true art was an exact replication of nature, describing Daguerre as the Messiah of a “revengeful God.” “And now the faithful says to himself: ‘Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are the same thing.’” Baudelaire contested the categorization of photography as an art form but also the claim that it functioned as a perfect transcription of reality.

Numerous types of photographic technologies emerged in the nineteenth century, each with their own technical idiosyncrasies. Daguerreotypes looked different from calotypes, and all were fuzzy compared to photographs today. Which of these could be said to best represent reality? Individual cameras could consistently replicate certain types of visual information, but this was not yet true of photography as a genre. 

Despite the protests of aristocratic art critics, commercial photography cemented itself as a market in France over the course of the nineteenth century. Arguments about its lack of creative merit gradually faded in the face of photography’s mounting profitability. Because of its technical novelty, however, it was unclear whether photography involved sufficient human creativity to qualify for protections under French copyright law. Erasing human influence from the photographic process was good for underscoring arguments about objectivity, but it complicated commercial viability. Ownership would need to be determined if photographs were to circulate as a new form of property. Was the true author of a photograph the camera or its human operator? 

In the mid-nineteenth century, answers to this question were hastened by the material stakes. The first legal designation of photography as a creative art form occurred in April of 1862, when the French photographers Mayer et Pierson successfully prevented the sale of retouched and altered celebrity portraits taken by their studio. Because they had taken the original photographs, Mayer et Pierson argued that the portraits were theirs alone to monetize. The court’s ruling represented a hard-won success. Earlier that year, it had rejected their suit on the grounds that photography was functionally automated — the medium was little more than a chemical process for fixing the image of external objects using a machine. 

What changed this thinking? When Mayer et Pierson appealed the decision in April of 1862, they used an argument that reintroduced human agency into the photographic process. By reframing photographs as les dessins photographiques — or photographic drawings, the plaintiffs successfully established that the development of photographs in a darkroom was part of an operator’s creative process. In addition to setting up a shot, the photographer needed to coax the image from the camera’s film in a process resembling the creative output of drawing. The camera was a pencil capable of drawing with light and photosensitive surfaces, but held and directed by a human author. Copyright protections helped photography commercialize in nineteenth-century France, but rather than clarifying what the photographic process was doing, this development codified it as both art and documentation simultaneously. 

If the court had ruled that photographs weren’t protected because the camera performed the bulk of the work, then an entirely new set of problems would have emerged with respect to the creative process. What of the painter who employed a team of apprentices in a large studio? An engraver that sold hand-made etchings based on famous paintings? Could a well-dressed portrait sitter exert some claim over the artistic process once the work was completed? Might the gardener of a meticulously maintained landscape declare authorship over a watercolorist’s portrayals? Establishing photography’s dual function as both artwork and document may not have been philosophically straightforward, but it staved off a surge of harder questions. 

Over the nineteenth-century, most western art markets established some form of copyright protection for photography, ceding that the medium involved substantive creative human input. In the popular imagination, however, photographers were still viewed largely as technicians. By 1899, Alfred Stieglitz lamented the view that “after the selection of the subjects, the posing, lighting, exposure and development, every succeeding step … require[ed] little or no thought.” Human intervention in the photographic process still appeared to happen only on the ends — in setup and then development — instead of continuously throughout the image-making process. Photography won its legal designation as an art form in the nineteenth century and spent the bulk of the twentieth convincing skeptical museum curators why.

Creativity & Commercialization In The Age Of AI

The success of photography as a medium hinged largely on early descriptions that appealed to nineteenth-century sensibilities. As European economies looked toward an industrialized future, the elevation of the photograph’s mechanical trustworthiness made it an ideologically compatible form of visual output. Separating human from camera was a necessary part of preserving the myth of the camera as an impartial form of vision. To incorporate photography into an economic landscape of creativity, however, human agency needed to ascribe to all parts of the process.

Consciously or not, proponents of AI-generated images stamp the tool with rhetoric that mirrors the democratic aspirations of the twenty-first century. Stability AI, now one of the subjects of a lawsuit filed by artists whose work appeared in their training data set, paid German nonprofit LAION to compile an open-source database with billions of images. LAION anticipated accusations of copyright infringement by invoking the spirit of democracy in descriptions of its work. The sparse amounts of information on LAION’s website emphasize its service to the public good. The “100% non-profit” and “100% free” organization is committed to the “liberat[ion]” of machine learning research. Their work facilitates “open public education,” and its recycling of existing data sets is described as “environment-friendly.”

Stability AI took a similar tack, billing itself as “AI by the people, for the people,” despite turning Stable Diffusion, their text-to-image model, into a profitable asset. That the program is easy to use is another selling point. Would-be digital artists no longer need to use expensive specialized software to produce visually interesting material. 

The lawsuit filed against Stable Diffusion describes the defendants’ egalitarian language as a ploy to exploit the legal gray area surrounding data sets scraped from the internet. In an interview cited by the plaintiffs, Midjourney founder Tim Holz said that to his knowledge,“every single large AI model is basically trained on stuff that’s on the internet. And that’s okay, right now. There are no laws specifically about that.” Meanwhile, communities of digital artists and their supporters claim that the reason AI-generated images are compelling at all is because they were trained with data sets that contained copyrighted material. They reject the claim that AI-generated art produces anything original and suggest it instead be thought of as a form of “twenty-first century collage.”

Because it is fast, cheap and easy to use, however, AI art continues to attract a broad user base. Lensa, an AI app that generates custom portraits for users, generated $8.2 million in the five-day period following the release of its “magic avatars” feature. The DALL-E 2 subreddit, an online forum dedicated to mastering OpenAI’s image generation platform, often echoes photography’s early attempts to be understood as a creative process. Proponents describe the process of summoning an image from the data set as “prompt engineering,” emphasizing the necessity of a human intervening by giving the AI certain prompts.

Others looking to elevate AI art’s status alongside other forms of digital art are opting for an even loftier rebrand: “synthography.” This categorization suggests a process more complex than the mechanical operation of a picture-making tool, invoking the active synthesis of disparate aesthetic elements. Like Fox Talbot and his contemporaries in the nineteenth century, “synthographers” maintain that AI art simply automates the most time-consuming parts of drawing and painting, freeing up human cognition for higher-order creativity.

Contemporary critics claim that prompt engineering and synthography aren’t emergent professions but euphemisms necessary to equate AI-generated artwork with the work of human artists. As with the development of photography as a medium, today’s debates about AI often overlook how conceptions of human creativity are themselves shaped by commercialization and labor.  

Economic Precarity & The Specter Of Automation

Viewing AI art as part of a broader pictorial history can temper fears that it is a prelude to a dystopian future. The problem with debates around AI-generated images that demonize the tool is that the displacement of human-made art doesn’t have to be an inevitability. Markets can be adjusted to mitigate unemployment in changing economic landscapes. As legal scholar Ewan McGaughey points out, 42% of English workers were redundant after WWII — and yet the U.K. managed to maintain full employment. In contemporary debates about automation, the real drivers of precarity often have more to do with the erosion of labor protections over the twentieth century. In the U.S., automation is an easy scapegoat for the gutting of worker protections. We look back on the development of the photograph as a technological transformation, not as one characterized by major waves of worker displacement. 

In the case of photography, we created a myth that cameras automated image-making in ways that were free from human interpretation. To make the photographic process legible to the forces of commercialization, however, we reframed it as a form of drawing, where human agents made marks using particles of light on a photosensitive surface.

An understanding of the technology as one that separates human from machine into distinct categories leaves little room for the messier ways we often fit together with our tools. AI-generated images will have a big impact on copyright law, but the cultural backlash against the “computers making art” overlooks the ways computation has already been incorporated into the arts. 

When copyright was finally extended to photography in the mid-nineteenth century, it was partially to avoid opening other forms of artistic tools to scrutiny. Are artists using computer software on iPads to make seemingly hand-painted images engaged in a less creative process than those who produce the image by hand? We can certainly judge one as more meritorious than the other but claiming that one is more original is harder to defend.  

Art is much more than what is captured digitally on the internet, but the internet is an indispensable tool for artists attempting to earn a living. The proliferation of AI-generated images in online environments won’t eradicate human art wholesale, but it does represent a reshuffling of the market incentives that help creative economies flourish. Like the college essay, another genre of human creativity threatened by AI usurpation, creative “products” might become more about process than about art as a commodity. 

For historians of visual culture, the debate that AI-generated artwork has already sparked is as indicative of our current political moment as artistic movements of the past. Private tech companies that shape our political and economic landscape frame large open-source datasets as “democratic,” while the artists whose work is integrated advocate for greater property protections. In a moment when “truth” is a concept fraught with political partisanship, we can no longer seek solace in the apparent reality of a photograph. AI-image generators are perfectly capable of emulating the look of traditional photography, forcing us to confront the very human ways in which images have always been made. 

Without a doubt, social media has revolutionized the experience, dissemination, and even creation of photographs. Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter have leveled the playing field in a lot of ways, allowing photographers to instantly share their work with hundreds or thousands of followers. Combined with the availability of high-quality cameras in smartphones and social media algorithms, the number of images disseminated to the world has absolutely exploded. Despite this democratization of the craft, has social media actually diminished the value of photography?

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. The list goes on and on. With just a smartphone, an app, and a few taps, you can quickly share your work with thousands of followers and likewise, digest the work of whomever you want. This ease of access, combined with decreasing costs of equipment and increasing capabilities and ease of use, has made photography explode as a hobby and blurred the line between amateur and professional. In turn, this has led to increased pressure on professionals to constantly produce content to keep up with the veritable tidal wave of onrushing images. This is especially a problem when you factor in algorithms, which often prioritize and reward consistent, repeated posting.

You might just say that photographers should simply avoid competing with the mob on social media, but that’s an issue itself. Consumer habits are constantly evolving, and nowadays, many consumers turn to social media first when looking for services. In fact, over half of Fstoppers traffic is now mobile devices. Many professionals can’t afford to simply cut out a wide swath of potential clients. Most consumers these days shop with a prioritization on quickly finding someone who fits their general needs and desires at a reasonable price, emphasis on “quickly.” This often means they’ll go with the first visible person who matches their rough idea of what they want. 

Quantity Over Quality 

On social media, likes and follower counts reign supreme. This means content production often focuses on gaming those quantities — going viral — over originality, storytelling, and artistry. I recall a few years ago when I made an unusual image I was particularly proud of, posted it on Instagram, watch the like count lag behind my other posts, and felt the strange urge to delete it. Why did I feel so influenced by that arbitrary number?

Quantity over quality, algorithms, and likes counts commodify the craft and diminish the artistry. “Instagrammable” locations become so because they offer easy visual impact; rather than mine the depths of creativity for original creative thought, we are trained and even pressured to take the most efficient route, cultural, historical, and/or artistic significance be damned. 

The Homogenization of Photographic Styles

Because photographers are (perhaps unconsciously) trained to chase trends, the craft as a whole becomes largely homogenized. When you are chasing what is popular at the moment, you will seek to emulate it, which only reinforces the popularity of that trend. Teal and orange, yellow raincoat in front of waterfall, backlit hair flinging ocean water skyward, significant other leading cameraperson by the hand, the list goes on and on (and on and on). 

The homogenization is only made worse by presets and filters. The consequence of ease of access and increasing efficiency of editing is a reduction in creative exploration. Why learn to color grade when the Mayfair filter will do it for you? 

The Balancing Act of Professional Photographers

All this is fine for an amateur who has no real skin in the game, and, I dare say, it’s even a good thing. At least, it encourages people to use a camera, to explore creativity without a technical barrier in place. But for professionals, it results in a significantly complicated landscape. Professionals who work years to develop a sound and recognizable personal style may suddenly find themselves beholden to the latest aesthetic trend, caught in a balancing act between relevance (and thus, income) and artistic integrity.

Beyond that, the flood of amateurs means increasing expectations for free or heavily discounted work. This can lead to an overall devaluation of the profession. Particularly as smartphone cameras continue to grow in their ability to produce good images in less challenging situations, educating the consumer on the value a professional offers becomes more difficult. 

The Future

While the platform of choice is seemingly always in flux, social media usage continues to rise, with Gen Z using it for even more time per day than Millennials, the first generation to at least partially grow up with it. So, the answer is not fighting the presence of social media; that’s a losing battle. Nothing short of a fundamental cultural shift will ever change that.

What photographers can do, however, is educate potential clients. The human brain tends to oversimplify that which it knows little about, and thus, it can be difficult for the layperson to understand the value of a professional in any realm. Almost everyone on the planet has had the experience of thinking they could tackle some task, only to realize they have vastly underestimated its complexity.

One cannot fight the tools, the algorithm, or the culture. Like it or not, professional images make up a very small fraction of the billions of photos produced and put out into the world every day. What one can do, however, is establish an argument for why what they offer is worth something more, why the mom and pop shop is better than the generic mega-store. Gone are the days of technical image quality being a sufficient argument. The most successful photographers I know today don’t sell images; they sell an experience. 

Conclusion

Social media and smartphones have, without a doubt, fundamentally changed the landscape of professional photography. They have given countless photographers the means to share their work and build their brand, but it has also led to a tidal wave of content and a homogenization of style. The viability of the professional photographer has not died, but what sustains that viability has evolved, and it is crucial that we embrace that. 

Why Small Businesses Matter

Shop small, do big things for your community

Why Small Businesses Matter puts a spotlight on the local merchants who donate their time, talent, goods, and services for the betterment of our community. The shop local movement spreads virally as local businesses who are “tagged” have the opportunity to share their story!

You’re IT Jessica Xu Photography!

Three questions with Jessica Xu, founder of Jessica Xu Photography.

Why did you start your business?

Before having kids I was an elementary school teacher; I loved teaching my students dearly. However, once I had my first child in 2012 I was motivated to find a way to stay at home with my baby so I bought myself my first DSLR. I had attended photo school before I got my teaching degree but had learned on film so it was a process to develop a digital shooting and editing style.

A couple of years and two babies later I started Jessica Xu Photography, shooting family sessions here in Darien. Being a family photographer is my dream job: I meet new families, I get to express myself creatively and most importantly I work out of my home and can meet my kids at 3:15 when they get off the bus.

What is your best-selling product/service?

When I started out shooting family portraits I only did mini sessions (and I still do them from time to time) but 15 minutes can feel so frantic. My favorite part of the job and my most popular “product” is the full family session. I love to take my time getting to know the families so I can capture them honestly and artfully. I think clients like the full session because we are all so busy and with a full session the family gets to choose the date, time, and location.

Have you “reimagined” your small business?

Transitioning from shooting mostly minis to more full sessions made me think about what kind of experience I wanted to give my client. Everyone who books a photo session is looking for great shots of their family but I want my clients to walk away from our session feeling like they participated in something special. I’m looking to avoid the frantic nature of a mini-session and I understand how most parents doubt their kids’ stamina for actively engaging (aka smiling) but my goal when I’m shooting is to let the session unfold naturally.

That might mean taking a break to chat for a minute about favorite books or tv shows and then we’ll jump back into shooting. I always take that mandatory smile-at-the-camera shot but then the real fun begins and we can get silly if that’s the mood, or serious if that’s where someone is at. Sometimes we’ll explore the location to find the best spot for frolicking. Sometimes the kids need to run a few laps to get their heads in the game (while I shoot furiously).

Sometimes Dad needs to run a lap. Taking the time to get to know my subjects helps me capture them more honestly and that means the photos look great on a holiday card and even better on a wall, in an album, or another keepsake. I’m shooting for posterity, I want to take images that decades from now, families can look at and vividly remember this season of their life.

Jessica would love to nominate Megan Dey who runs Squishy Life Photography to be featured next – “A local infant photographer! I gave newborn photography a shot about ten years ago and it is so hard! Not for me; what she does is pure magic!”

Visit Jessica Xu Photography online here, and make sure to check out their Facebook page as well!

HamletHub thanks Fairfield County Bank for making our Why Small Businesses Matter series possible!