Here’s something I don’t understand the moral logic of: a rumor site that posts watermarked images clearly originating from another rumor site, who themselves watermark the posted images they obtained from elsewhere. It appears they expect no one to scrape and republish their scraped images while they don’t mind scraping and republishing from others. The best I can come up with is “see, I had it first.”
One of the things I learned in business school was not at all directly about business. It’s that everyone has moral positions that are often either (a) not thought through; or (b) based upon an unchallengeable first premise. You can’t talk about ethical business practices until you wade through those two things, and they turned out to be immense walls that almost everyone in the class had built for themselves and was hiding behind.
Now, you might not think this has anything really to do with photography, but it does. One of the challenges of the day is to accurately describe what exactly is a photograph and what is completely an artist’s creation. This problem raised its head early with the first version of Photoshop and other similar tools. Indeed, there became a clear separation between the capture process (film), which was tough to fake, and the output process (digital scan and processing), which was.
Probably the most “real” photos ever we re contact sheets. You took a photo, you developed the film, you directly duplicated that to paper (you might have to reverse values along the way, but that was a simple direct reversal). A contact sheet, particularly one annotated by the photographer themselves is about as close as it comes to “I saw this, pressed the button, and this is what was captured.”
You probably saw right through that last sentence, though. The photographer could have manipulated the scene, altered the exposure and tonal values (think filters), or did something in the processing that wasn’t the norm (think cross processing). Still, a contact sheet with a clear forensic trail is about as close I’ll ever get to “this happened, this is what it looked like, and here’s the proof.”
Today we’re in an age where anything is possible, and often happens.
Photoshop sort of pioneered the whole image manipulation idea, and with the Generative AI additions Adobe has recently made, trying to tie a pixel to something in the real world is now impossible. Moreover, startling things are happening.
Recently I was processing an older image a bit differently, including an area I had cropped out before because there wasn’t a way to “fix” it reliably (part of a vehicle was out of focus and blocking part of the frame). This time I used the whole frame and asked Photoshop to render something in the area I had cropped out before. What surprised me is that what Photoshop put in that area that was nearly exactly what my vehicle was blocking. Mopane trees often have distinct bark distortions, usually caused by elephants. That particularly tree had what I thought was a unique elephant mark. After all, I could see that mark clearly in some of my other images taken that day.
However Photoshop’s Generative AI managed to put a near duplicate of the tree into position for me, complete with what seemed to be the same mark! I actually spent several minutes comparing the fake tree trunk with the real one, and couldn’t find any clear difference. What should we make of that?
Long ago my mentor Galen Rowell and I talked at length about photographer ethics and morality. Every photographer has that (whether they know it or not). Most never think about it or even realize what their practices actually are. Some, like those in my business class, live behind walls they’ve constructed that on close examination are much like the Emperor’s New Clothing.
NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association), of what I was once a charter member, developed a Principles of Ethical Field Practices back in 1996. They’ve since expanded what was once a small card you could carry into a full book. Meanwhile, I was running Backpacker, and we practiced things like Leave No Trace. Today we also have a host of other similar well meaning organizations and statements of practices that just try to dot every t and cross every I. Yeah, that’s not what we need, either, though I support those efforts for the most part.
What you need is a small set of clear, reasoned, and practiced first premises. You then examine all your decisions based upon that.
I’ve written about this before. I once was flabbergasted to see a well-known professional photographer pull up a blooming, living plant at a World Heritage site, move it to where he wanted it, take his photo, and leave the dying plant where he had placed it. Apparently his morality was “whatever makes my image better.”
While I’ve been known to move rocks for an image, I also move them back. In fact, upon lifting a rock, I make sure that it doesn’t have a clear, active ecosystem under it before moving it, otherwise I put it right back down. Yes, I want my photo to look better, and that rock didn’t help (or would help more over there), but I also didn’t want to disturb the natural sense of things any more than I would by walking through that environment.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this. I get asked a lot these days about whether or not they should use any of the AI tools we now have available to us. My answer is yes, as long as you have an ethical stance and can treat AI like I do rocks.
For example, a common situation that happens in wildlife photography is that if you expose for the underside of a flying bird (which is usually in shadow), you’ll probably blow out the sky. Well, that’s not what we see in that situation (bird detail, no sky detail). Our eye/brain constructs the scene so we remember the beautiful bird flying against the (often interesting) sky. Well, that’s the photo I want to capture, too.
How do you do that within my “move/replace the rock” ethic? Simple. 1. Exposure for the bird and take as many BIF photos as you’d like. 2. Go back and expose for the sky (with no bird in it) on the same track. 3. In Photoshop, Sky Replacement using the well exposed sky with the well exposed bird layer. That’s what I would have seen and remembered, so why does pressing a camera button mean I have to give up one aspect of what I saw?
Of course we now have smartphones that sort of do that on the fly. Adobe’s Project Indigo camera app essentially is taking multiple exposures with my iPhone and processing them into a finished image much the same way (actually better, as it will stack out matching detail to reduce noise in it).
What’s not cool is not understanding what your morals are and what ethical practices that will enable (or destroy). Blindly using AI without thinking about what’s being done, how, and for what reason is lazy ass ethics, in my book. Whatever you do needs to be defensible, and defensible across repeated actions without having to add “but if X, then Y” constructs.
I want you to see the world I experience in my photos. That’s my job as a photographer. But my other job as a photographer is to make sure I don’t start sneaking away from that and start inventing things that I didn’t experience. At the point where I cross that line I’m no longer making photos, I’m creating art. In my Backpacker days, we labeled that “photo illustration.”
The thing you can never do with a camera is “capture reality.” You make a lot of decisions without realizing it. For instance, which lens is on the camera, which direction the camera is pointed, where you’ve focused, and when you press the shutter release (or when the camera does that for you). If you’re creating JPEGs, you’ve picked color, contrast, saturation, and sharpening aspects of the final pixels. Thing is, the photographer standing right next to you is making different decisions. So is his photo unreal and yours real? What’s just out of frame can be as important to the meaning of the photo as what’s in the frame, after all. Using a longer lens is a form of editing out things if you think about it.
My goal in taking a photo is “this is what I want you to see.” Generally, that’s what I saw and felt when I was there, all done without changing anything from the way it is or could be (those temporarily moved rocks ;~). Moreover, when I process an image, I’m going to process it in a way where I control how your eye takes it in so that you’re taking in the same thing I took in, and not wandering off paying more attention to the unimportant things in my photo.
Painters start with a blank canvas and add. Photographers start with a full canvas and subtract. We both seek the same thing: visual and emotional impact from what’s on the canvas.
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Bonus: The interesting thing is that I’m more manipulative of the things in my frame when I photograph Events and Weddings. In fact, I’m darned manipulative, because most human subjects go into what I call the “frozen stick” pose the minute they see a camera pointed at them. A few go into a “crazy pose” they’ve developed or learned. Neither looks natural, so I have to intervene. The great thing about my current cameras is that they don’t make a sound when I take a photo and can hold focus when I’m not looking through the viewfinder, so my subjects often are just interacting with me and not noticing that I’m taking photos. Great. That’s what I want: natural interaction. Or simplified: natural.
With sports, I can’t manipulate others, only me. I have to think like coaches and players and know the plays. Anything less and I get random images that may or may not capture the right moment. But if I have a strong feeling the next play is coming to a specific spot, guess where I am? I want my sports photos to feel like you’re right there at the point of action, so that’s where I need to get. I manipulate me.
But note the word I used: manipulate. When you take a photo, you’re making seen and unseen manipulations. The real trick to becoming a great photographer is taking control of those manipulations. Just make sure you have an ethical stance of what you can/should/will manipulate and why.
