As I write this post, I am sitting in a deckchair, next to my campervan.  We’re away for the weekend, so that I can continue my training for the 12km swim that I am doing next month.  The campsite where we are staying is blissfully quiet, so my only real companions this morning are the birds, singing in the trees overhead.  My wife has gone for a run, most of the other campers don’t appear to have surfaced yet, so I feel like I have the place to myself.   When these moments present themselves, which isn’t all that often, I tend to go into a reflective mood.  This morning is no different.  Today’s subject?  Preparedness.

This weekend actually started on Thursday, when my wife had to go to her office in Bristol.  I love Bristol for many reasons, but principally for its chilled-out vibe and the opportunities it presents for people watching.  As a photographer, people watching is usually a segue into the genre of Street Photography, which has been popular since the 1930s. Perhaps the most famous street photographer of them all was Henri Cartier-Bresson, who’s concept of The Decisive Moment, revolutionised the whole act of composing and shooting some action unfolding before us.  In layman’s terms, the decisive moment is an instant in time when something is captured, where nothing in the frame has been nor will be repeated either side of it.  Everything in the composition has a role within the picture, with nothing superfluous to describing the moment being included.  The viewer is presented with all the visual references needed to make sense of what the picture is, and derive some meaning from it.  There are many famous examples of the decisive moment throughout photography and it’s a notion that is regularly reassessed and challenged by artists to this day.  That’s not what I was reflecting on, however.  My wife and I had come up with a plan, where we would drive to her office on Thursday, I would spend the day in Bristol, and after she’d finished her work we would head straight to the campsite near Cirencester, which is closer than it would be to return home first.  I’d decided that this was an opportunity to experiment with some street photography, by using a slightly longer focal length lens than is usual.  The genre usually involves a small 35mm camera with a 28, 35 or 50mm lens fitted, in order to capture the action and whatever visual context is elsewhere in the scene, that will encourage the viewer to look at the whole frame.  28 and 35mm lenses are considered ‘wide-angle’ in terms of field of view, so are perfect for capturing those details, with the only drawback being that you have to get close to the subjects.  Street photographers who use these focal lengths tend to be pretty confident people, because alerting the subject(s) to them being photographed not only potentially alters ‘the moment’, but their reaction could become aggressive it they took exception to it.  For example, Bruce Gilden used to literally push his camera and flash gun close to the faces of his subjects, while shooting on the streets of New York.  Most people either flinched or forced themselves to ignore what was happening, but some reacted angrily.  Using a short focal length introduces some risks then, but the payoff is that wide angles offer interesting perspectives when shot closeup, while preserving more of the background context.  50mm is what’s known as a ‘normal’ lens for 35mm cameras as it closely represents what the human eye sees in its central field of view.  Cartier-Bresson used 50mm on a variety of Leica cameras, stating that he saw it as an extension of his eyeball.  Although these are traditions that date back 90 years or so, there’s nothing to stop someone using a longer focal length for street photography, and that is what I wanted to do.  There were a few good reasons, of course, the first being that when shooting digitally, my options are not all that great for this genre of photography.  My DSLRs are really noisy, with a mirror flapping up and down every time a picture is taken.  The best way of drawing unwanted attention to what you’re doing, is to use a camera that screams “look at me!”.  I have many film cameras that would do the job, but I didn’t really want to shoot film on this occasion, because I still have a backlog of developing get through before I return to that medium.  The only digital camera without a noisy mirror was my compact Sony which, although quiet, has no viewfinder and needs to be composed using the rear screen.  Again, if you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, best not use a camera where you’re waving your arms in the air like some demented chimpanzee.  Another more technical reason was the separation that can be achieved when using a longer focal length at a wider aperture.   Separation of the subject from background, where the latter details gradually blur out of focus, doesn’t fit the traditions of street photography or indeed Bresson’s decisive moment.  It does help draw the viewer to into the key subject in the frame though.  Again, traditional approaches didn’t mean that I couldn’t experiment with it a little.  I chose an 85mm f/1.4 lens to go shooting with, which traditionally used for portraiture.  The advantage of this lens, apart from its speed, was that I could compose from a comfortable distance with a setup that, from the subject’s perspective, looks like I’m shooting something broader, because it doesn’t look telephoto.   My plan was simple enough: walk around the city observing anything around 20m or so away from me, shooting with an aperture between f/4 and f/8 to get that separation of subject from background, but leaving enough of the latter for the image to make sense.  The day was great fun, as the sun was shining, and everyone in the city appeared to be having a good time.  

All photographs: Nikon D300, 85mm f/1.4, ISO250, Yellow Filter

However, when I returned to the van to edit the pictures, that’s when I realised that my seemingly careful planning of the shoot was somewhat lacking.  My old DSLR uses a Compact Flash memory card, which is generally used less and less in modern digital cameras, most manufacturers now choosing to favour smaller SD cards instead.  I have a card reader, but which I’d forgotten to bring with me.  In the event of this occurring (it does more frequently than I’d like), I can download the images from the camera directly, using a mini-USB cable and adapter for my MacBook, which has only USB-C compatible ports.  Of course, I had brought every conceivable cable with me in my camera bag, for connecting lots of other devices, except for that type.  Now, in the grand scheme of things, the ability to download and edit pictures immediately after shooting isn’t really all that important.  It was frustrating though, and it led me to reflect on how I tend to approach things these days and the conclusion was ‘increasingly lazy when considering the finer details’.  I’ll have an idea for a project, plan it to a point and then get shooting.  While you can’t plan creativity to the n’th degree, the practical details appear to get lost in my haste to get to the part that I most enjoy about photography.  What I find interesting is that I didn’t used to be this poorly organised in my previous career, where the smallest details needed to be captured and understood.  You couldn’t design a solution to a problem, for example, without carefully having planned how to validate that it works, both predictably and reliably.  You cannot just rush to what you believe the end goal is in an engineering environment.  Of course, coincident to my reflections here was the terrible news of the loss of five people aboard the Titan deep sea submersible.  With the realisation that the worst scenario has now happened, the questions have immediately started circulating about the machine, the robustness of its design and its suitability for the use in one of the harshest environments on the planet. It is wrong to speculate about such things while investigations are ongoing, and I won’t do that here.  However, as human beings we cannot help ourselves but ask ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ when something in our plans, whether trivial or serious, goes wrong.  What I’ve realised is that I sometimes focus too much on ‘letting go’, a criticism levelled at me by a few of my university tutors previously, in order to be creative and make photographs, leaving the other more mundane details to take care of themselves.  Perhaps I should be planning the practical side more to begin with, and give myself the space to create afterwards, rather than think of it as a single process.  As Burns said “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft a-gley”, which make sense.  However, Nietzsche put what I see to be the counter suggestion, “The Devil is in the Detail” and I think he may have been on to something there.  

“As far as I am concerned, this is not photography”, some opinionated guy said to his bemused friends.  A lively discussion followed, before everyone decided that the meeting had overrun, and it was time to stop.   This happened last week on the regular call that I have with my fellow students.  The guy? That would be me.   

We were discussing a topic that, unless you’ve been living in the wilderness for the past year, has been a regular news item on almost every news outlet; that of Artificial Intelligence, or AI.  We got onto this slightly controversial chat because one of our group had uploaded an AI ‘photograph’ for our image challenge, just for the fun of it.  The conversation that followed was fascinating to me because my strong, and not particularly humble, opinion was met with some great arguments in support of the technology.  Our group is made up of very talent photographers, each with different experiences, genres of interest and styles of learning, which results in us all learning from each other.  After this call, I was left reflecting on what AI really means for the creative arts and whether I will ever likely use it. 

Artificial Intelligence, outside television and the blockbuster movie space, has been around for decades.  The idea of using machines to learn and think was postulated by Alan Turing, widely recognised as the father of modern computing, in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a lengthy debate about whether intelligence can be truly ascribed to a machine and how it might be tested.  Turing was limited by the technology of his time which though, unknown to most civilians, included computing machines that he developed during his code-breaking work in the Second World War.  With the evolution of computers, came the inevitable continuation of AI research, and eventually it started to become part of our everyday lives at some level or another.  We have the obvious examples, such as satellite systems in our cars, that can plan optimal routes and automatically adapt them with changing traffic conditions, smart speakers that can recognise voice commands, shuffle music that we might like etc., but we also have the more subtle uses too.  Social media, for example, uses sophisticated learning algorithms to present us with recommendations and tailored advertising based on what it they see as our interests.  We also have plugins for commonly used software like, well, Adobe Photoshop.  Being a regular user of its sister program for many years, Lightroom, I’ve seen the tools become more sophisticated, but its only recently that they added AI in the shape of noise reduction to the suite.  This kind of software has existed for a few years in other produces like Topaz Denoise AI, but it was only this change in my own workspace where I noticed the considerable difference in performance to how I was working previously.   Prior to the current version, reducing noise in a photograph was a process of trial and error, selecting the pixel size, deciding how much detail to preserve, masking etc.  Without using batch editing, it could be a fairly time-consuming process.  The new version presents the simple option of ‘how much do you want?’ as a percentage and takes care of everything else.  I used it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and, despite causing my elderly Macbook Pro some pain, it yielded impressive results.  So, AI for supportive tools that take more and more workload off is brilliant and harmless, right?.   Well, maybe not.  In his paper, Turing said of the objections to machine intelligence “The consequences of machines thinking would be too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so.", referring to the idea that ‘thinking’ machines could eventually lead to our subjugation or, worse still, our destruction.  Such fears have been creative fodder for the movie industry, with such films as Terminator, or the scarily realistic Ex Machina.  The news items that are around us daily, talk of people getting ChatGPT to write something that is passed off as original, or as in the context of my student call, creating ultra-realistic images that could be mistaken for actual photographs.  The image that was submitted in our photo challenge was created by an online AI research platform called MidJourney, and in essence it works by using a series of text descriptions, similar to metadata, to create an image. The software can also analyse an existing image to determine a set of text descriptors, and this is what my friend did to respond to the challenge’s brief.  He got MidJourney to analyse our ‘theme image’ and then used its own description as the information for it to create a new image.  When I was preparing to write this blog, I asked him to do the same with one of my photographs to see how close to the original it might be and, as I hope you agree, the results were remarkable. 

Abbey Mill, Tewkesbury, by Richard Fletcher

This photograph was shot with on film using a square format medium format camera.  Apart from dust removal and small adjustments to create the final photograph, it’s pretty much as shot.  

Output from MidJourney using the text: "black and white image of mill and bridge up river, in the style of dramatic movement, contemporary landscapes, hasselblad 1600f, vibrant airy scenes, dark sky-blue and white, shiny, suburban ennui capturer"

MidJourney created a number of versions for me to choose from and I’ve included the ones that best represents the original.  We see a building on a bridge, over a fast moving river, set in dramatic stormy conditions, much like mine.  The key elements work, such as the long exposure of the water, the light is coming from a consistent direction, the look and feel of contrasty black and white photography, and the aspect ratio.  I think it’s a pretty good effort with relatively little actual data.

Did I have an epiphany when I saw these, to the extent that I re-evaluated my opening comment?  Well, not really.  I certainly do not see this as ‘photography’ because the term inherently means ‘drawing with light’.  I don’t see photography in the traditional terms of being pure, truthful or incorruptible, because that’s all frankly nonsense.  Artists have been using photography to subvert stories or perspectives on the world since its conception.  We’ve been able to modify images to create rhetoric and alter narratives with ease as digital camera and editing technology has advance.  At its heart, though, it is a medium that represents what a real object or situation, even if the artist conceptually plays with how that representation might be interpreted by the viewer.   What I acknowledge after this exercise, and with some further prompting from my fellow friends, is that AI’s birth as a creative tool is very similar to that of photography, which suffered derision and suspicion from the painters of the mid-19th Century.  It evolved into a creative art in its own right because an artist used a tool to be creative.  All that has changed in the case of AI is the ability to create in a non-visual way.  The output is digital art, which is still art if it speaks to people about something related to the human condition.  If the spark of creativity comes from a different source and the computer does the leg work, who really cares?  After reading an article about how the use of text influences the context of a photograph, something the viewer is unaware of when looking at an AI image, I got to thinking about how this technology might work when in the hands of a true wordsmith.  If, for example, a poet were to write the text descriptors, what would the resulting image represent?  Would the AI be able to articulate, in some form, the poet’s ideas visually?  If a brilliant writer like the late, great Terry Pratchett had used AI, would we have a different sense of wonder when thinking about his fantasy realms?  Where would this ‘intermediate’ interpretation leave the ideas that Barthes’ postulated in The Death of the Author, where the burden of interpretation shifts to the reader (or viewer in this case)?  Sometimes, as in the case of William Fox Talbot, experimental technology unwittingly takes our skills in other areas to whole new levels.  Fox Talbot was a frustrated sketch artist, who used a camera obscura to help guide his pencil, before wanting to find a way to permanently freeze the image.  His technical mind created one of the inventions acknowledged as the beginning of photography, the silver and salt process.  Could a similarly inventive person take AI and digital art into a whole new direction by trying to overcome a creative problem?  I think so, which is why my perspective has shifted from where I belligerently started.  Yes, there are valid concerns about where AI images could find their way into a chain of evidence or derail a criminal prosecution.  It will undoubtedly get the ‘Fake News’ brigade excited too, who are keen to present a ‘truth’ that could do with some much-needed credibility.  Then again, if we need technology to protect core values like our courts, schools, media, etc, that will need to be developed alongside.  The media portrayal of the evil genius waiting to take over the world has been with us throughout the work on the human genome, the development of fertility treatment and genetic engineering of vaccines for so long that we are naturally afraid of anything new and complicated.  For now, I think AI is actually a potentially powerful tool, as long as we see it for what it is and what it is not.  Also, the engineer in me can’t help but want to play with it myself, now that I’ve seen that potential.  As a photographer though, I’m not interested in it forming part of my work, choosing instead to happily shoot with my ever-growing collection of film cameras.  The former may influence the latter in the end, though. If that happens, I guess I’m going to Photography Hell. Could someone put the kettle on when I get there?

Link to the article about AI and Text: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/gregory-eddi-jones-49-23-considering-technology-ai-and-photography

My thanks to Mark Racle for driving MidJourney and to my fellow students for widening my gaze.

This week I find myself contemplating a photography decision I made a couple of years back.  If anyone thought this post was a Rick Roll, a link to Mr Astley’s 1980s smash hit, I’m sorry (not sorry) to disappoint.  No, the decision I refer to was covered in End of the Aerochrome Road, where I tried, and failed, to get some decent images from the magical and incredibly rare film stock, Kodak Aerochrome Colour Infrared.   I’d stalked that film for several years, finally parting with a large sum of money for 3 rolls of it in 35mm, which went straight in the deep freeze.  Why was this film so special?   Well, Aerochrome was sensitive to light just beyond the end of the red region of the visible spectrum, called the near infrared.  The arrangement of the film’s layers and the dyes that formed in processing, meant that some properly funky colour shifts appeared in the final slide.  It was developed for ‘military and commercial’ applications and it’s easy to see why.  Used properly, the film highlighted some subjects better than others owing to the way IR light was reflected from them.  Man-made objects appear easily discriminated from the natural vegetation, which in turn stood out from water and so on.  Being able to see man-made structures hidden in vegetation has obvious military applications, but the film was also used for environmental surveys, where the types of vegetation could be observed.  Years later, it became a creative tool, most notably when Richard Mosse documented the conflict in the Congo on 16mm movie film (linked here). The main problem with Aerochrome is that it’s easy to get it wrong.  First, there’s the choice of which filter to use to block out large parts of the visible spectrum.  Then there is the matter of focus, which is slightly offset from where we would focus in the visible. Most of all, though, the issues of the film being expired (it was discontinued in 2008) and loading the film in total darkness present significant challenges.  If you don’t compensate for the degradation in sensitivity because of the former, you can easily get underexposed slide film, which is frankly the worst thing in film photography as far as I’m concerned.  Compensating for expired slide film is not quite as straightforward as for negative film, which typically involves overexposing by around a stop of light for every decade past the expiry date, depending on who you listen to. Slide film is notorious for having little in terms of exposure latitude, so overexposure is a veritable minefield. Too much, and the highlights become washed out and, because of the film is positive, unrecoverable.   Finally, forget to load in darkness or at least incredibly low light and, well, you’re royally screwed.  All but that last one happened to me on all three rolls of film that I had.  I knew that it had been stored correctly from supplier to my freezer, sent the rolls to a company that specialised in handling IR film for processing, and shot it in a professional SLR that I knew was able to handle it, my Nikon F6.  It was a disaster.  With the increasing rarity of Aerochrome and the eyewatering prices to match, I decided to call it quits. 

Then by chance, as I was looking for some sheet film in my stock, I noticed a film that I’d completely forgotten about, Rollei IR400.    This is a film that, like Aerochrome, is sensitive to light in the near infrared, although nowhere near as much.  It’s black and white, and more importantly, it’s still in production.  What if I had a go with this stuff instead?   Thing is, I’d had shot Rollei IR400 previously, which explained why I had some in my freezer.   Unfortunately, in an experience similar to its colour cousin, I didn’t do the best job with it.  I was still fairly new to shooting film at the time, so I thought it would be much the same as any other stock.  I did some research, picked up a Leica IR filter, which is a very dark red colour, and cockily started shooting anything I could find when the sun was out.  Pretty soon it became apparent that I’d been caught out by focus and metering.  There are a few problems with shooting IR in a modern 35mm SLR camera, the first being that if there is autofocus, it probably won’t be able to ‘see’ through the dark filter (dark red or orange are the popular ones), so you need to focus without the filter in place, then add it afterwards, remembering to switch off any autofocus system before pressing the shutter button.  That amount of faffing pretty much rules out handheld shooting.  You could, like me, use a rangefinder, where composition and focus are not achieved by viewing through the lens.  The second issue is as I said before, focus is slightly offset for IR, so simply focusing for visible light will introduce some tiny error.   Most photographers get around this by buying older lenses that have IR focus distances marked on their barrels or using a small aperture, say greater than f/11 to provide a larger depth of focus.  Me?  I just went ahead and shot that film wide open, which meant that quite a few of my photographs were blurry where I’d missed focus altogether.  Some might call this ‘creative’, but I call it a bit shit.  When it came to metering, there was another error that I made.  Rollei IR400 is rated, well, at ISO400, which is pretty fast.  However, when you slap a dark piece of glass in front of the lens, the light has to work much harder to get to the film, hence a dramatic drop in the equivalent film speed.  In fact, with an R72 filter the attenuation of the light is around 6 stops, which drops it to around 6.25.  I had the Leica IR filter, I couldn’t find any attenuation information for.   I could easily have measured it, but I am, frankly, lazy.  I metered my shots at anywhere between 12.5 and 25, so ended up with plenty of underexposure and ‘crusty’ grain, neither of which I am a fan. 

Here’s the thing, though.  None of that mattered when I first saw the flawed images.  Black and white IR film is just stunning.   Like the colour version, the contrast between the luminance of different surfaces, like water, ground and the sky is huge, but in this case it presents as tonal rather than shifted colour.  Clear skies tend towards black, foliage brilliant white and man-made structures ghostly.  Speaking of ghostly, try shooting a portrait with this stuff and your subject takes on an other-worldly glow.  It’s a great film stock if you fancy making some ‘authentic’ Victorian-style ghost photographs, although nobody is fooled by that anymore. 

Malvern Priory (2017)

Leytonstone (2017), featuring some dangerous measures to get 'that shot' 

Since my disastrous foray into colour IR, I’d pretty much given up on this type of film.  However, I’ve developed (pardon the pun) so much as a photographer in the years since those first rolls of Rollei, that I’m excited to give it another go.  I’ve bought an R72 filter that will fit most of my modern Nikon lenses and have loaded some 35mm into the F6.  Something must have subconsciously told me not to quit, because for some reason I had bought some Rollei 4x5 sheet film at some point, which I can shoot in my Crown Graphic. I am excited to see how those special tones come out on a large format scale, once I’ve mastered shooting the smaller version.  I say mastered, but in all honesty, predicting exactly how different subjects will reflect light in the near-IR band is a little hit and miss.  It’s what separates these film stocks from the more conventional and is why some photographers see it as an ultimate creative tool.  As we enter the summer in the UK, I now just need to go out and find some subjects and experiment with it.  So, as Rick would say, “we know the game and, we’re gonna play it”. Well, for now, at least.  I’ll share whatever comes of it in a few week’s time.