For The Love of the Craft: Beyond the Capture and AI Influence

Art and technology combine to help us create compelling imagery.

Mojave Desert Art Installation. All photos by the author.

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Photography seems to attract people from two disparate camps; those who purely love the art, and those fascinated by technology. Of course, those two factions mix their obsessions as a cook does with fine wine and shallots… a splash of this, a splish of that.

Superb technical photographers produce wonderful photographs, and art-based photographers are no slouches when it comes to technology.

I think of that blend as “craft.”.

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I have been a photographer for 60 years. I have witnessed so many changes in the art and business of photography that sometimes I want to just write it all down.

From the beginning.

I guess the beginning for me was the still image.

I was so obsessed with the black and white photos taking shape in my dad’s old, red plastic developing tray that the ‘how’ of it all was all but forgotten.

I just wanted to make a photograph. Any photograph.

My dad got me a Brownie, but that led to major disappointment. I appropriated his Voigtlander, and that worked better. I would spend every cent of lawn-mowing money on film, paper, D76, and Dektol.

But the problem with just shooting and making is that eventually, in photography, you realize that there is more to it than the snap.

The images I saw in my head were becoming harder to get onto that sheet of Kodak Glossy #3 than I thought.

They were washed out, too contrasty, badly composed, too soft, too dark, too light, “fuzzy”.

I was making photographs that looked awful for the most part, but getting a ‘good one’ every now and then.

Something had to change.

Enter the craft of photography.

Crafting the Image

I knew that in order to make the images I wanted to see, I would have to develop a knowledge of the technology. (See what I did there…. crack myself up.)

I had to learn about exposure, contrast, ISO, chemistry, composition, burning, dodging, vignetting, and on and on and on.

But most of all, I had to learn about lighting.

For photographers, light is the heart of the craft

You can’t fake good lighting.
You can’t wish it to be in the darkroom.
You can’t bleach it or burn it in or “hot-dektol” bad lighting into good lighting.

You see it, you capture it.
You don’t, and you don’t.

And about light, I became obsessed.

I began deconstructing every image I would see. From LIFE magazine, to the images in Popular Photography to eventually every photo in Vogue.

My magazine issues were full of scratchy red ballpoint pen marks, questions, notes, and suggestions to myself.

I would look at the image, deconstruct it, and try to reconstruct it to get that look.

Roll after roll, Polaroid after Polaroid.

I was truly obsessed.

(And, on occasions, broke as hell.)

To tell you the truth, I am still pretty obsessed with light.

Light that evokes mystery, brings a tear, enlightens, charms, or brutally exposes.

I love it.

Telling a Story

After decades of making images, I have slowed a bit.

Just a little, I tell myself, but my output belies that semi-truth.

I have not shot as many photographs in these past few years as I did previously.

But - and this is important - it is not because I am not interested in making photographs.

I am not interested in making photographs that I am not interested in making.

A “pretty” landscape is wonderful to admire, but it has to take me beyond the natural beauty of the place. It’s not a rejection of a ‘pretty picture’, but a deepened desire for a special picture. A deeper picture. An engaging picture.

It has to tell me a story.

Just a little story will do, but it has to bring me to understand the very reason it exists.

There are so many photographers making beautiful photos of beautiful places, and I love to look at all of that work. To a point.

But I have a different approach to the stuff I photograph. I am not necessarily looking for beautiful subjects, I am shooting photos for my mind, my taste, my own curiosity.

I prefer to craft my work, and crafting takes time.

And time is an asset that diminishes over—well—time.

Craft in the Age of AI

I see AI as a tool—nothing more, nothing less.

I use it in my work for many things; sharpening with AI, masking with AI, even selecting and blending with AI. I have no problem with that.

And you shouldn’t either.

Because that is all in the realm and the nature of craft.

In the days of the ancients, it would be similar to finding a better and faster way to sharpen a stick or make a fire to stave off the cold canyon night winds.

The craft of making the image convey what I want it to say has not changed; the tool to make that happen just makes it easier.

Where AI cannot help me is in making choices.

Choice-making IS the craft of our art. It’s the very heart of every artist.

Everything comes down to making choices—tens of thousands of them, within the microseconds it takes to compose and expose.

From the choice of lenses and cameras and light direction and texture and moving just a little bit to the left…. a little more… now down just a skosh*…

Choices = decisions = commitment = art.

And the use of AI as a tool is one of those choices.

But if I let AI start to make choices for us, we begin to give up the craft. We start to think of the choices as a bother, as ‘too much work’ to do before we get that final piece of “art.”

Craft is not too hard.

It is exactly as hard as it has to be to help us get to the why of our work, the heart of our work, the reason for our why of our work.

Random algorithms are no shortcuts; they short-circuit our creativity and bring something to the work we didn’t intend.

Not even subconsciously.

That is not what I dedicated all those hours of learning this craft to do.

And for me, without craft, it is simply uninteresting.

I worry that too many want to skip the craft and move on to the algorithmic artifacts only to end up with work that looks nothing like the result of humans at all.

A soft genericism of output that inspires no one, engages no one and simply exists for a few moments only to be forgotten as it is piled upon with more and more of bland, generic output.

A fragment of nothing, lost in an instant because it had no reason to exist to begin with.

There is a desperate and overwhelming need for authenticity in the world.

Deliver that; let your work be seen… and use all the tools your craft allows you.

(*Skosh… a bit more than a smidgen, but less than a tad.)

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(I am heading over to Joshua Tree again tomorrow. I want to share that magnificent desert with my wife, and she wants to make some photos there as well. She sports a mean iPhone and wants to make a calendar. Cool!)

See you next time.

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