Ethical Demons
I really don’t want these tools…
I make a big deal about my practice of photography. I don’t crop. But that’s a lie. I certainly have croppped, but I try not to, I generally don’t, and on the off-chance that I feel the need to, I only crop in proportion to the original frame — a small concession but it gives a consistent feeling across images. Still, a rationalization. In my heart I consider the need to crop a failure. So my practice is not to crop, even if I miss sometimes.
So with that strict internal-and-somewhat-conflicted policy in mind, I just returned from Japan. I shot about 2000 images; about 100 make the cut.
But there was this one. A couple dressed in kimonos were milling around in the Bamboo Forest in Kyoto. There were ebbs and flows of people in the area, but they seemed to be hanging. I tried to catch them among the trees, but people kept walking by. I’d say I missed, I didn’t get the shot I was aiming for. I got down low to minimize the crowd, but still…
At the hotel later, I decided to try the AI-fill tool in Lightroom, remarkably easy to use, with no instruction, and the image went from this, to this:
And while I like the second image, and it’s precisely what I was hoping to capture, I don’t consider it “photography,” and I’m frustrated I even tried it. It’s a slippery slope between clearing out some visual noise to changing their expressions and body positions, to painting the entire thing from my minds-eye with AI.
A case can be made that there is hypocracy to deny content aware fills but to accept various other digital darkroom tools like HDR or sharpening. Still, I settle on the limitations that seem consistent and honest. So I stare at the tools I won’t use and wonder how long I can resist.
When I assemble my favorite images from the journey, I wrestle with how to treat this mutant. In the end, I left it in my private set of travel pictures, but I excluded it from the book for the public I have made available. It feels like a lie. And even one lie brings the entire set, maybe all my work, into question. The end doesn’t justify the means. Photographers have to be willing to deny themselves tools that will most certainly make for more impactful images, something that seems foolish to ignore, but a shift that changes everything about what we call photography.
Thoughts?
