Is AI Destroying Photography?

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Hey, it’s Jay P. Morgan. Is AI going to kill photography? Absolutely not and I’m going to tell you why. And I think I’m qualified to tell you why because I have lived long enough and shot long enough that I have seen many transitions in this industry. It went from film. I shot on film for years. We went from film to digital and everyone freaked out, “It’s going to change photography! No one will know what an image is anymore.” Which may be true. But it’s going to change everything completely. And in the end, digital was wonderful. I couldn’t get on the digital train fast enough. It was a great way to work, to be able to see what you’re doing and to be able to shoot. It was excellent!

Then Photoshop. I used to do all my images with no Photoshop. Then Photoshop came along and you could put anything together and art directors went crazy. They want this, they want to cut that together and 20, 30, 40 images and hours of retouching and in the end everything looks so fake that everyone started going, “What is this about?” And then the next year photography came and you know what it was, it was very organic and it was flawed. And it was more interesting. And that whole Photoshop of plastic skin kind of went away. And we became a much more, really more interesting and real look at photography. So we survived Photoshop. But now Photoshop’s a great tool. Digital photography is a great tool. AI is going to do exactly the same thing and there’s parts of Photography it will never change.

And the first one is it will never change the fact that we need to record important events in our lives. Good grief, nowadays an important event in our life is a dessert at some restaurant, you know. We photograph everything. In 2023 they estimated almost 1.6 trillion images would be taken. 1.6 trillion at a time when digital photography and digital cameras have dropped from like almost in 2009 it was almost up to 128 million sold. Now it’s flattened out at around 8 million sold each year. So we’ve seen that huge drop off. But the number of images has just exploded. Why is that? Because people are using their phones and that’s a valid way to work. But here’s why one of the first reasons why photography will never change and that is we have to record the important events in our lives. We’re not going to do an AI wedding. We’re not going to do AI, here’s AI of my first child. Here’s AI of my first birthday. Here’s AI of my… it’s just, there’s no way the market would ever respond to that. They’re going to look at that and it’s going to become fake almost immediately. And we’ll go right back to recording the events and capturing the moments that have significant meaning in our lives. And that’s what’s going to survive. And that’s why photography is going to survive.

Number two, photography is a great hobby because it gives us meaning to the things that we do. One of the people on our Facebook group said it really well. It says, “Nothing can replace the joy I feel when I hear that shutter go.” It’s a rough translation. But you know, there is something about hearing that shutter go. It gives you a reason and a purpose to be different places. It helps you record the things that you see in different places that later you go back and look at. And helps you remember those experiences. Sometimes if you never go back to look at them it just gives you a feeling and an experience when you’re there. It gives me an experience when I’m someplace and I don’t know what to do, I take pictures. And I love that experience. I love to take pictures and it gives me meaning in just about any situation. Photography is that. It gives us meaning and it gives us purpose. And we want to be together. And when we get that meaning and purpose on our own, individually, out shooting, sometimes it also crosses over into a great meaning and purpose with other people. We get together with other photographers. We share images with other photographers. We get on chat groups and look and talk about images. That becomes a community and an experience that is not about building the perfect image. It’s about having an experience that’s perfect for us and personally perfect. That’s why AI is never going to destroy photography. Not photography as a real medium. It’s never going to do it.

We were out at Bolsa Chica one day shooting and here were two ladies, retired, with little joggers with all their long lenses and their cameras and taking pictures of birds. And they’re trying to get a bird in flight. That’s the “coup de grace”. That’s the image they really want. So they’re out there with their cameras trying to get these shots. And I’m looking at these two ladies going, this brings real meaning and purpose for them. You know, a bird watcher doesn’t get on the computer and look up a hawk and say, “Oh, there’s a hawk, seen it! All right, let’s go on to the next bird.” No, they want to have the experience of going out hunting and looking for the bird and taking a picture of the bird. Or just having seen it and recording it. That is the experience that people want to have. And photography is like that. There may be a billion great shots of birds flying, but until you can take a great shot of a bird flying it’s not going to mean as much to you. But when you can accomplish that, you feel like you’ve accomplished something in the craft. You feel like you’ve done something that is meaningful and you have progressed as a person in a hobby and a choice that you’ve made that makes you accomplished. And there’s a lot of personal satisfaction in that experience. People will continue to do that. I have the feel, I love to take pictures of animals. I want to be out. I want to find a great picture of an elk or a big horn sheep, you know. I don’t want to generate one on a computer. I don’t want to put a big horn sheep on the perfect mountain top with a sunset. It doesn’t mean anything to me. Which brings me to another point.

It’s fascinating because in film it’s very obvious there are people who love to edit. They just eat it up and they just live for it and they edit like crazy. And then there’s people who love to shoot. I love to shoot. I don’t like to edit when I do film. I’m not an editor. I think photography is the same way. You find most photographers are more shooters than they are editors. And so AI is not going to take that group of people who love to be out creating and shooting and experiencing things and turn them into editors. It’s not going to happen. It’s not their personality. It’s not what they love. Now there may be some that do and will. But those people will have their own journey and it’s a great journey. There’s nothing wrong with it. But AI is definitely not going to touch that group of people who love to go out and create and have the experience and want to capture those images.

You know, storage for us is always a problem. We have 200 terabytes of storage. When it came time to add more storage we looked around for something that would give us more accessibility when we’re on the road. We chose a QNAP TS AI-642. The reason being is that this is really a standalone computer. It allows us to hook it up through ethernet into our system so all the different computers can get on and to be able to access it. But we can access it from the road as well. It’s got HDMI ports in the back so I’ll be able to put a monitor on this, if you want a keyboard because it’s got USB-C ports. It’s really a server that allows you to get access to your images. And it’s set up to do photo and video. And it’s got some incredible AI programs that allow you to sort and to find the images and your video when you load them to this fast system. So the AI 642 for us, just in one package gave us a great NAS system with the ability to put large drives so we have a lot of storage. We can access it with our mobile phone. We can access it access it on our network. So then when you add Q-Magie, the app, it really becomes a system that is working the way we work today. It allows us to get to our images our video really quickly. It becomes a complete package from home, to on the road. So there you go, that’s why we chose the QNAP TS AI-642.

So photography can be a personal experience or a social event. And social events bring people together. And it’s not about coming together with our computers and editing together. It’s about going out and shooting together. So I heard an artist talking on a podcast about AI and they said, “You know, I create images about The Human Experience.” And as I listened to them they created incredible images and they really are accomplished. There’s no doubt about it. I have great respect for what they do. But when you tell me that you’re going to create images about The Human Experience and you’re going to do it with AI from your studio or your office or your basement, I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t quite understand that journey.” If you’re going to talk about The Human Experience you have to be out in the human experience and you have to feel it. That’s why Robert Frank, you know, went out and traveled. That’s why Walker Evans went out amongst the people and did journalistic kinds of street photography. Because they wanted to feel The Human Experience. Their images really showed the depth of The Human Experience. Dorothea Lange, the dustbowl images, the most, one of the most famous images ever taken of the mother with her children. You know, that was about that moment in that place. You can’t replace that with doing AI about The Human Experience. I don’t see how those two come together. I don’t see how that is going to accomplish it. Now you may make great art but I don’t think you’re really going to communicate The Human Experience unless you’re out in the human experience. That is why photography is not going to be killed by AI.

So you know the old saying, the best camera is the one you have with you. And cell phones have become that. We have them with us all the time. It’s easy to carry them places. Well we carry them everywhere. We would be lost without it. What’s the worst thing that happens to you in the morning? “I forgot my phone!” I mean people freak out. So you always have that camera with you and it becomes a tool. And what has happened. Imagery has gone up. It’s exploded. There’s more images because we’re capturing more of our experience, more of the things that are happening. It just becomes a tool. AI will simply become a tool, a tool that will help. Some will want to use it heavily, create a barn, put a barn in the background in this picture of Iceland that they wanted that they couldn’t get. You know, put a picture of a tree, put trees in the background of the animal they photographed. Some people will do that and that will be their journey and that’s absolutely fine. But it just becomes a tool. AI becomes a tool that will help us in that journey just like Photoshop, just like Lightroom. Just like any of the other tools that we use, cell phones and lighting equipment. So AI is simply going to become another tool in this process. And will it be one that I use? Absolutely! On the Facebook book group someone said, “I’m going to use it for culling and for some edits to my, you know, weddings and things.” I’m going, yeah, absolutely! Why would you not use it for things like that? That saves you time and lets you accomplish what you’re going to do anyway. So I think AI is going to become a really valuable tool for us.

Even though AI will enhance our images and make them better it will not destroy our desire to go out and to get the images, for most people I don’t believe. So it becomes something that helps us in our journey. It doesn’t replace the journey. I personally, and I’m a very old school photographer who started on film, I personally feel like there is something in the Journey about finding the elements and creating really good composition with what you find there. I think it’s an art. I think it’s difficult. I think it really is a challenge. And I think it really, when I can accomplish it, I feel like I’ve really accomplished something. Being able to get things to compositionally work with the elements that are physically there. I’ve always said illustrators can paint things wherever they want them, you know. Photographers have to find them and get them in the right place. For me that journey is really rewarding because I want to find things and manipulate them in the scene to be able to make them work. Do I do things like cut some branches to hide a post and things like that when I’m doing commercial work? Absolutely! But when I’m out just shooting for myself I’m just looking for a composition that is clean and is pure. And I can do it with what elements are there. It’s really rewarding.

One of the people in our Facebook group made this statement, they said, “It kind of makes a mockery of capturing the moment.” I mean, there’s something pretty powerful about that statement. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was the man who coined the phrase of the decisive moment, capturing that decisive moment, AI does kind of make a mockery of that. Whereas capturing it is really an art and it’s something that is so rewarding if you can do it. And that’s what most people are out there doing. That’s what most photographers out there are doing to capture the moment. AI kind of makes a mockery of that. Kudos to my Facebook group. You guys are amazing being able to talk about these things. I found it very inspiring, the things everyone said. So thank you for your input.

After all of that, the one area this is going to impact the absolute most is advertising. So a graphic designer or art director is going to put together an incredible comp with AI. And most clients who are not generally as savvy about visual things as art directors and graphic designers are going to look at that comp and go, “Well, let’s just use that.” Especially for social media. This will be a battle that will be very difficult for art directors and graphic designers to win. And so I think I see that industry being pushed down this road where you will start to design images, comp images, design images, graphic designers and art directors are going to start to create images to fulfill social media. Although social media has that same aspect that everything else does and that is there has to be some reality to it. It has to be The Human Experience. You can’t just create images: a great barn on the hillside with a cow chewing grass, you know. You can really do so much of that and you have to be out in the The Human Experience. So I see that it’s going to affect advertising completely. It’s usually about getting the perfect image. And it doesn’t matter how you get there, if you’re going to AI generate the stuff in the background, create sets for part of it. We saw this when they created virtual backgrounds for cars. It almost overnight killed the car industry because you could create a background and put a car in there and Photoshop. And you could, the same car was shot 360. You can map it, you can shoot it and put it into all different kinds of backgrounds. And you immediately had, you know, multi- different shots, multi- different locations. Whereas it used to be you’d have to pay a photographer to shoot each one of those locations and scout them and find them and they’re like $100,000, $200,000, you know, at least, to be able to do one of those images. And so that kind of just killed the photography or it killed the car industry. That’s going to happen. A lot of that’s going to happen in advertising. It’s going to hurt advertising, I think, the most. It’s going to push advertising photography kind of to the Art Direction level in a lot of ways. Those advertising photographers who can understand AI and use AI and be able to create images with it will survive. And they’ll have a lot to input because it is about seeing and understanding lens and perspective and just the way things are laid out and composition. So advertising, about getting something visually stunning, is close to what the graphic designer or art director wants. And so AI is going to really feed into that process. So I see it really affecting advertising a lot. I think it’s going to become a main stay in advertising.

Having said that, this creates a whole new industry for photographers who really understand the process and I’ve heard them called Promptographers. This became pretty obvious to me when I saw two different people put a prompt in for basically the same kind of an image and they were very different outcomes. Your ability to explain and to prompt light and texture and age and mood and all those kinds of things are going to become integral to creating a really good image in that AI experience. So I think it does open the door for a whole new type of photographer who enjoys that experience. Maybe part of it will be actually captured and part of it will be used in AI. Or maybe it’ll all be done in AI. It certainly will work in Fine Art. There’s absolutely no question about that, that there’s going to be a Fine Art application. And people are going to use it and, you know, if the market responds to it, it will. I don’t know, you just have to see how that goes. But I think it’s really a new, it’s green fields, it’s a new horizon for photographers who want to get into that industry. Just how much will it feed the industry? I don’t know yet. It’ll be interesting to see. So in the end is AI going to kill photography? Absolutely not, because it’s not going to change you and you are photography! So keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!