Your Job and Industry May Have Been Eliminated

Today and yesterday have been OM System days. I have set the OM1II up as well as I can for candid family shots, and I shot a bunch of pictures.

Early impressions:

The autofocus is going to be a challenge. In some ways, it is supposedly superior to Sony’s, but it lacks some nice features. It does not have an “infant” tracking setting. Just “person.” When I shoot photos of my son with his mom, it often insists on focusing on the wrong person. Also, while we were at Walmart, it focused on a lady about 75 feet away. She was between them, and the camera thought she was the subject. I lost a bunch of photos because I was not able to get the autofocus to do what I wanted.

I failed to set up burst shooting, because when I was setting up the camera, it refused to let me do it until I was in a certain mode. I forgot to do it later. I will fix that. Choosing images is 50% of photography, and you can literally be a horrible camera user and still produce astonishing photos as long as you shoot enough and get lucky sometimes. I don’t think I’m supposed to say that, but it’s true.

I got a shot of my family that is simply amazing. It was the result of spray and pray, but I can say I did the editing. This is actually normal, although photographers aren’t known for talking about it. When you shoot candids, you can’t frame everything perfectly and get everything right. It’s not possible. Bursts are not cheats. They are survival tools.

My wife is in bed behind my son, her head on a pillow, and he is sitting up, in the light of a bedside lamp. She is out of focus, looking at him with love. He is up close, with his head taking up half the photo. His image is razor-sharp, and he has one of his typical angelic expressions on his face. I don’t think I should post it here. Too bad.

His face was seriously overexposed in the original shot, but this is why I shoot in raw and use Photolab. I put an AI mask on his face and brought the exposure down. It looks perfect.

I’m not a bokeh Nazi, but in this photo, dramatic subject isolation works. The bokeh is mild and very smooth. His mom’s features can be seen well enough to tell the story, but he is still the star.

I don’t know that this is the best camera for running around with the family. The Canon Powershot V1 seems to have better electronics for that particular job, and sacrificing the lens choices the OM1II provides may be worth it. Experience will tell.

In other news, I made some forum guys angry. Not a shock. There is a forum I rarely go to because of the gatekeeping and condescension, but I posted there just to see what the response would be. I wrote about the lady photographer who tried to rip us off for thousands of dollars for a baby shoot. I knew there were a lot of pro photographers in the forum, and almost no one there is any good. I wanted to see how they would respond to informed criticism of shameful practices among their peers.

To their credit, some of them criticized baby-photo sharks. They complained that “moms” with no experience were putting them out of business with home studios spawned by the boutique-coach industry.

I don’t think moms are their big problem. AI is their big problem. You want stock photos? You got ’em. Basically free. Custom photos of subjects that fit your needs? Same. You want to make videos of yourself talking, but you don’t want to shower, get dressed, put together a nice set, and pay a videographer? AI will do it while you lie in bed in your underwear.

One guy got annoyed with me, perhaps because I was criticizing the fraternity. He tried to find ways to prove I was hypocritical or inconsistent, but that didn’t work, because I wasn’t. A mod locked the thread, complaining that continued complaining didn’t accomplish anything, which was ironic. Actually, I brought up a very important topic, at least for consumers, so the expansion of my criticisms was valuable and timely content.

Pro photography is in very big trouble. No doubt about that. There is no way bad things can fail to happen when machines produce unlimited free content which is far superior to the kind of stock-grade imagery most pros are only capable of producing. What I don’t know is who this will hit the worst.

I believe it will hit the people on the bottom rungs first, because they are so easily replaced. But AI is probably capable of generating “art” photos as well as anyone, just by guessing. Will that eventually put a dent in the profits of really talented people?

What about publications? If Sports Illustrated learns that it can get extremely impressive dirty swimsuit shots of imaginary perfect models in nonexistent locations and still make money, will it give it a try? If Better Homes and Gardens wants to show the world a perfect kitchen just as an illustration, not needing a real kitchen for any purpose, won’t it just ask AI to make one? Why shouldn’t it?

If someone wants a magnificent living room photo of a forest in the snow, and a machine can make it better than a man can, will he care where it came from?

Competent photographers are a penny a dozen. Really good people are less common, but not terribly rare. Is the world going to belong to machines and amateurs soon?

We ooh and ahh over the great photographers of the past, but if you look around, you will find numerous people, right now, doing work that is just as good.

Machines will never be able to replace amateurs who shoot people and places because of passion and love and so on. No machine will ever be able to give me the satisfaction of creating good photos for myself and my family. Interesting.

Now here’s a great photo I shot the other day when I ran into the Incredible Hulk in Daytona Beach.