A-maze-ai-ng

Quite a number of my photographer friends are “creating” and posting AI images at the moment. You won’t be seeing any AI-generated images from me anytime soon for two main reasons.

The first is that much of the enjoyment of producing an image for me comes from the whole image-creation process – researching locations, travelling to new places, finding compositions for shots on location, working with models who are such lovely people, taking the pictures, looking through images to select the best ones, editing the images, and then showing them to friends online or more importantly in print. If I produced my images with AI, I’d only really get the latter stage, and I think missing out all the other stages would significantly decrease the satisfaction I got from image creation.

Secondly I have no imagination, literally none. I am unable to pre-visualise images, which is why models never receive mood boards from me, and the images only really come to me when I am at the location with the model, and ideas come flooding to me. So as AI requires me to describe the image I want textually I’d just be sitting there scratching my head!

As an example, the series of images of Lulu Lockhart in this blog post are taken at a maze that is up in the mountains in Italy. Many of my images are about shapes, so the beautiful curves of the maze were perfect for my style of images, but I would never in a million years have come up with the prompt “Lulu standing on a huge orange maze up in the mountains” or anything remotely similar.

I regularly get people asking me whether some of my images are composites, which I take as a compliment, as they do not believe that anybody could get a model to that location, with that light. So I present to you Lulu standing on a huge orange maze up in the mountains that we found. Beyond my imagination, but not beyond my ability to create in reality!

Many thanks to Lulu for creating these and all of the other great images with me in real life, and all the best to fellow creatives experimenting with AI.