Made with Kling AI. Even the most detailed prompt didn’t give me the results I wanted…

On AI

AI is my competitor and my assistant, and I see no point in pretending it is only one of the two. It already does work that photographers used to be paid for. It also does a good share of my work for me, as long as I keep an eye on it. This page explains where I draw the lines, and why they move.

The competition

Generators now produce stock images, product shots and illustrative portraits in seconds, at a price no photographer can match. Some of that work used to pay studio rents, mine included. Pretending otherwise protects nobody.

Outside my profession, few people care whether an image was photographed or generated. They scroll, decide in half a second and move on. Soon most of them won’t be able to tell the difference, and many won’t mind. I would rather accept that than organise another panel discussion about authenticity. Complaining about the future is a reliable way to become a bitter old man, and I’d rather be a curious one.

So the useful question is what I offer that a generator doesn’t. My answer: a photograph of you, made with you, in a situation that actually took place. Some clients need exactly that. Others need a convincing picture quickly and cheaply, and for them a generator may well be the better choice. I’d rather say so openly than pretend every image needs a photographer.

The tool, inside the picture

Inside the photograph, AI has two jobs in my studio: retouching and removing things. With Photoshop and Evoto I correct what a lens exaggerates and nobody would notice across a table, and I remove what doesn’t belong in the frame: a cable, an exit sign, a coffee cup that wandered into a boardroom portrait.

It is faster than it used to be. It is also confident and occasionally wrong, so every result is checked and finished by hand, and most of the time saved goes into that check. The gain here is real but modest: less brushwork, more judgement.

The tool, around the picture

Where AI really earns its keep is everything around the photograph: correspondence, quotes, research before a shoot, finding the right people to talk to, the texts on this website. Work that used to eat my evenings now takes a fraction of the time.

For a small studio, this is the bigger change. It lets me run the business side with the precision of a small agency without becoming one. Used well, AI doesn’t take time away from photography. It gives time back to it.

What I don’t use, yet

Generated backgrounds combined with real photography. Every six months I test the current image generators properly, much like checking whether Lake Zurich is warm enough for a swim. So far the answer has been: not quite.

Resolution is the main problem. A generated background that convinces on a phone falls apart in print or on a large screen. When that changes, I will use it and update this page. I have no loyalty to difficulty for its own sake.

What stays with me

A portrait is made in a room with another person in it. Light, timing and what happens between photographer and subject are decided there, not in a prompt. Improvisation on location is king and queen.

Where retouching ends and invention begins depends on the job. A corporate headshot, an editorial portrait and a campaign image follow different rules, and I agree on them with each client. Left to my own devices, I lean towards what was actually there.

We have been here before

When photography arrived in 1839, portrait painters lost sleep. The miniaturists, who painted small likenesses for lockets and mantelpieces, saw much of their trade disappear within a generation, and Baudelaire dismissed photography as a refuge for painters who lacked talent.

Many miniaturists then moved into the new medium and hand-coloured and retouched photographs, which makes them, in a way, my professional ancestors. Painting, freed from the duty to record, went on to its most adventurous century. Neither medium replaced the other. Each became clearer about what it was good at. I expect the same now.