Tog-Talk
Photographers in conversation: Essential guidance for new photographers on technique and artistic growth. That’s what ‘Tog Talk’ is all about—bringing photographers together to share insights and elevate their craft.
Tog-Talk is the home of UK professional photographer, Kevin Ahronson (Founder of Hampshire School of Photography). Every two weeks he is joined by one of his ex-students (now turned professional photographer) Kelly Perrin, where they'll dive deep into topics that matter to beginners, from mastering your camera settings to developing your unique style.
On alternating weeks, Kevin will dedicate the episode to answering listener questions, providing personalised advice to help you overcome challenges and grow as a photographer. Whether you’re struggling with exposure, landscape photography, street photography, photographing people, portraits and families, macro photography, flash photography, learning about editing with Photoshop or Lightroom, seeking composition tips, or exploring creative ideas, Tog Talk is your go-to resource for learning and inspiration.
Make sure you subscribe, so that you never miss an episode of this engaging and informative podcast.
Tog-Talk
Ep. 32 AI in Photography: Evolution or Revolution?
Host: Kevin Ahronson, Founder of Hampshire School of Photography
Co-Host: Kelly Perring
Episode Summary:
In this thought-provoking episode, Kevin Ahronson and his co-host, Kelly Perrin, dive into one of the most controversial topics in photography today: the role of Artificial Intelligence. With humor, insight, and a touch of personal reflection, Kevin and Kelly explore whether AI is a powerful tool for photographers or a potential threat to the craft they love.
•Kelly’s Latest Projects: Kelly shares exciting updates from her photography studio, including mini sessions, a unique transitional photo shoot, and an upcoming photography competition for the Hampshire Photography Network.
•AI as a Game Changer: Kevin and Kelly talk candidly about how AI has transformed the way photographers manage their businesses—from automating text generation to enhancing marketing efforts—and how both use AI in their work.
•AI in Photo Editing: Kevin explains how AI tools like Adobe Firefly, Topaz, and Lightroom’s new features have saved him hours of editing while maintaining creative integrity. He contrasts the efficiencies AI provides with the ethical dilemmas it presents.
•Ethical Dilemmas and Real-Life Impacts: Kelly shares her personal experience with AI-generated images, including the unexpected emotional impact of seeing “flawless” AI versions of herself. The duo dives deep into the societal concerns of AI-generated beauty standards, misinformation, and the influence on young generations.
•AI in Competition: The conversation turns to the controversy of AI-generated images in photography competitions, referencing the infamous Sony World Photography Award incident, where an AI-created image won a prestigious prize.
•The Future of Photography: Kevin shares his predictions on how AI will evolve in the photography industry over the next 5 to 10 years, touching on the resurgence of film photography and the enduring human love for simple, tactile creative processes.
•Advice for AI Experimenters: Kevin offers practical wisdom for photographers curious about experimenting with AI in their workflow—encouraging moderation and mindful application.
Memorable Quotes:
•“AI is like a good single malt whiskey—enjoy it, but in moderation!” – Kevin
•“We love our technology, but we get romantic about the old stuff.” – Kevin
Got a Photography Question?
If you have a burning question about (virtually) anything to do with photography, click on this link. You can record your question onto your device (phone, laptop, etc) and if picked, I will play it during the show. https://www.tog-talk.com/voicemail/
Photographer's Evening
Want to attend one of my free Photographer's Evenings? These are small groups of up to 8 people, sat around a table with me, exploring your photography journey. If you live near Fleet (in Hampshire), click here for more information:
https://www.hampshirephotoschool.com/a-photographers-evening/
Looking for courses
Want to find out about my live, in-person workshops, check out the Hampshire School of Photography website:
https://www.hampshirephotoschool.com
Hampshire Photography Network
A free Facebook group for amateur photographers who want to connect, collaborate and grow together.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1222685165227144
Contact me
You can contact me by leaving a message via this link: https://www.tog-talk.com/contact/
...
Hi and welcome to TalkTalk. My name's Kevin Aaronson. Talktalk is photographers in conversation. A couple of things before we start this week's episode. Kelly and I had some issues with sound quality. We recorded her part of the conversation remotely with software designed for that, but it hasn't really been very clear. We've been very disappointed. So from the next session not this one coming, but from the next session Kelly's joining me in my studio to record in another microphone that plugs into my mixing desk and we should get much better quality. The other thing is I mentioned some workshops which are planned for September. We recorded this back in late july, early august, but time has not been good and things will be delayed a little bit, so don't take those timings as literal. Thank you for listening. Let's get on with the show. Welcome, kelly, hello, hello, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 1:It's your second time it is. It's so exciting.
Speaker 2:So exciting.
Speaker 1:Deserves a cup of coffee, doesn't it really?
Speaker 2:It does. Thank you for allowing me back after the last one, after the last.
Speaker 1:What would be a good word. I don't think fiasco is right, because it wasn't a fiasco and it wasn't a debacle either.
Speaker 2:No, it was just very chatty.
Speaker 1:Experience. It was an experience. Yes, shall we say take it away intro? Yes, you say it, take it away intro. Hi, my name is Kevin Aronson from Hampshire School of Photography and welcome to Talk Talk 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.
Speaker 2:All engines running Liftoff. We have a liftoff.
Speaker 1:Well, it's great to have you back, Kelly. It just seems absolutely ages since last we chatted, but it's only a couple of weeks, of course. What's been happening with you since we last met? Anything exciting.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I have launched my mini photography sessions and my full photography sessions in my studio here in Fleet and I've already done a couple of shoots, which have been amazing. It's been really fun to use the studio and actually capture some really great images. I've done some headshots and I also did a gorgeous like transitional photo shoot of a lovely, lovely girl who was transitioning from ballet to football, and so that was really good fun and we had a dog come in and it was just lovely.
Speaker 1:It was lovely to use the space I trashed transitions once from from ballet to football I'm sure you did in my wildest dreams you look good in a tutu. I'm sure in my younger years I would have looked pretty good in a tutu. I've always been complimented on my legs, actually even from a young age, um, but let's not go there, let's, let's move swiftly on. Um anything else been going on, or it's just basically work, work, work work, work.
Speaker 2:I have been prepping um. I'll give you a little spoiler, because for the um Hampshire Photography Network I am going to launch a competition, uh, monthly competition. So that's all I'm going to say for now. You and I have had a little chat about it. I'm really excited about it. Yeah, I think probably the next time we chat we'll probably be able to give everybody some more details.
Speaker 1:Outstanding. Can't wait for that. Of course you're dying to say well, what have you been doing, kev? I?
Speaker 2:am. What have you been up to? What have you been up to, Kevin? Tell me all about it.
Speaker 1:Well, a couple of things come to mind. I'm in this position now of because I've moved into kind of semi-retirement, I wanted to spend more time training online. I've never really done an awful lot of online training because I didn't want to. I much prefer seeing people face to face and working in a classroom with real people, because it's easier to read people, it's easier to react and for them to react, it's a much better working environment and it's a much better learning environment.
Speaker 1:But I understand, of course, that for some people maybe they just can't get to where we are in fleet.
Speaker 1:They live too far away or possibly their, their work means they they can't attend the sessions.
Speaker 1:So it's inevitability that I've got to do some online sessions and I'm working with a beta group of people at the moment there's eight people and we're just looking uh, we're just looking at some stuff online and what works and what doesn't work, and so that when I start, probably in September, I'll be in a strong place to run stuff online.
Speaker 1:And then the other interesting thing and I guess I didn't want to admit this to myself is that back in January I moved into semi-retirement but it's proven to be quite difficult for me because I hate letting go of the things I love to do, and the whole idea was to keep Linda, my wife, happy was that I would only be working three days a week. So I've limited myself to just three days a week with people, but of course planning for those still takes up time. So I'm desperately not trying to do so much work that I infringe upon my family time and in that process I have neglected quite a bit of useful background activity and the kind of things that you have to do as a professional all the marketing stuff you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's really important because you don't keep telling people. You're out there, the business doesn't come in. So I've been going through quite a lean period and wondering why. Then I realized, oh, because I've not been advertising, I've not been out there telling people.
Speaker 2:So I'm having a rethink on that and just to um jump on what you said about the marketing aspect of being a photographer and constantly having to put stuff out there. Um, consistency is key, but I would hope that you use tools to help you, tools like like um scheduling your posts, using ai to help you with your um, your marketing and your advertising. Do you do that?
Speaker 1:um, yes, not in terms of scheduling my posts. I'm not that well disciplined. I tend to oh, look you. Because we just know the audience don't know. We've got our cameras on, although we're at homes. We're at home and I've just spotted my naked knee appearing in the shot on the video. You guys can't see this. You can only hear us, but look, that's my knee yes, I was trying to keep a straight face old men's knees.
Speaker 1:I just don't anyway. So no one normally sees me in shorts, because I think old men in shorts is.
Speaker 2:You know oh, which reminds me I'm wearing leggings today after your yeah what? But they are short leggings and I've got a long top on. But honestly, after our last chat and then I put leggings on this morning because I was going to a national trust with the children and I thought, oh, my god, I really hope I don't see kevin if you don't know what we're talking about, guys, listen to the previous episode where Kelly first joined me.
Speaker 1:Anyway, ai. So yeah, in terms of posting stuff, I tend to just do it when I need it. Having said that, in the group in the Hampshire Photography Network, all the regular posts in there are scheduled about three or four weeks ahead. But that's not using ai, that's just using facebook scheduling system. Yeah, okay, so do I use ai? I use ai quite a lot. Yeah, I do, um, in lots of different ways. So I actually probably two distinct ways, not lots of different ways, so two distinct ways. One is with text.
Speaker 1:I use it as a tool to help me plan things and particularly if I've got to send out a bunch of emails or I'm preparing an introduction to something, the AI has a great way of sitting through lots of time. Here's a good one. So I've got a number of clients just a small number, it's three or four who have paid for me to mentor them privately for a whole year. And when we have a zoom conversation, zoom records the conversation and then, using ai, sends you back a report, summary that conversation with bullet points, action points and sections with different headers and at a glance, I can just go over the conversation and it's an instant reminder, without all that having to. Could you imagine having to sift through a hot an hour the conversation and it's an instant reminder without all that having to? Could you imagine having to sift through a hot an hour's conversation and pull out the important elements? Zoom ai does it for me. Massive, massive time saver yeah, I, I, um.
Speaker 2:As you know, I run a couple of different businesses and ai has been an absolute game changer for me when it comes to my other businesses, because I'm dyslexic, so a lot of the time writing text and the spelling is often wrong, the grammar is often wrong and sometimes I don't know how to phrase things and articulate things in text, and so I use AI as if it is my assistant and I will type in today I want to do a post about this blah blah, blah, blah, blah. I want it to cover this blah blah, blah, blah blah, and then it will give it to me perfectly so that I can just copy and paste into Instagram. So, for me, ai has been an absolute game changer with, with work, um, for my other businesses.
Speaker 1:But what I think, um, I would love to chat about with you today, uh, kevin, is ai in photography and whether you think it is a good thing or a bad thing don't let anybody hear my answer, okay, so I mean there have been some classic cases within the last year or so where I think people have entered into competitions and so on using a bit of ai. We were talking about this earlier. Can you remind me what that one was?
Speaker 2:yes, so a gentleman called boris I can't remember his surname, it wasn't boris johnson no, no, great photographer, boris johnson, no, boris um won the sony world photography awards and the highest prestigious award in that uh, in, in that kind of show, if you like. He won it and then when he went to accept it, he refused it and he announced that the photo that had won was created with ai and he it, to the sound of photographers jaws dropping all over the country. I know, I mean, I think it's brilliant because he did it to open conversations about this. Yeah, um, and and he bought a lot of press coverage around this, and I think you know every industry that um, that people that I've spoken to in various industries are worried about AI. So for photographers, it is worrying. For me, I'm worried. There are photos out there that you genuinely can't tell if they are photos from a camera that somebody has taken time and effort and years of learning, and then there are photos that AI has created.
Speaker 1:What this reminds me of is Uber coming along to take all the business away from taxi drivers in London who have spent years learning the knowledge. Learning their trade exactly and I still have never booked uh an uber because of that yeah, no, I don't use uber either.
Speaker 2:It's funny, isn't it? But you know, do we?
Speaker 1:progress? Yeah, yeah and okay. So I'm in a fairly unique position, which is not typical for a photographer, because, by the very nature of my work, which is preparing presentations, and also as someone who's trying to keep a group of several hundred people in the facebook group, the hampshire photography network, interested and motivated and galvanized and contributing, in that I'm producing images using AI. When I'm editing my own work, I only use AI image production if it's going to be used where it's clearly AI. Do I use AI in any other way on my own pictures? Yes, I do. The first question I'm going to answer is how I use AI, and then the second one is how I see this is going to affect photographers in the future. So I will say, before I even get to that second question I haven't got a clue. In reality, nobody has. Everyone's being asked and you're probably going to get several different answers, and there are some key global figures who are terrified by it and there are some others who are absolutely loving it. So no one knows. If you watch the Terminator film series, you're probably terrified. Anyway, how do I use it with photos Within the Facebook group, for instance, if I'm trying to generate interest in a specific event I'm putting on, I might create the imagery using AI if I don't have anything suitable from the thousands of photos I can draw on from my own library, from the pictures I've taken over the decades, and sometimes it's just easier. Do you know? It's actually easier and quicker to go onto Adobe Firefly, and I don't even have to type the instructions in. On a Mac, you can double click the function button and start dictating your instructions straight onto the screen hit enter and boom, the picture's created. Sometimes it gets you wrong, but the alternative is to start going through something like 50,000 images across two computers to try and find the perfect image, which in the end may not be the perfect image. So for that kind of thing, for images which are part of a presentation or to form part of a marketing graphic, which is what I'm going to ask, it as AI for me is absolutely. It saves me hours of work. Absolutely it saves me hours of work if I'm working on photographs which are not for that purpose, so in other words, photographs which I would submit to the public. As this is my work, do I use ai on those in a much reduced way to remove things from the picture, and of course, we've been using photoshop and lightroom, although you know lightroom's way of doing it up until recently was absolutely rubbish. But now we're using ai. You can get rid of the dustbin in the beautiful scene of the mountains and the cangorns. You can get rid of the spotty little oracle who stands in front of the camera when you're taking a lovely sunset. You can. You can do that.
Speaker 1:Are you a passionate amateur photographer in Hampshire or the surrounding areas? Do you ever feel like your hobby is a solitary pursuit? Well, we know. No matter what your hobby, it's much easier to stick with it when you have friends to share it with. That's why we created the Hampshire Photography Network, a free Facebook group for amateur photographers who want to connect, collaborate and grow together. Ready to connect with other photographers in your area? Head over to Facebook and search for Hampshire Photography Network. Just remember to answer the three simple questions to gain access.
Speaker 1:I have a conscience and if I feel that any change I make somehow jars with that conscience and I can't really put this easily into words this is a gut feeling as a human being and also in terms of owing a sense of responsibility to all the people that I teach.
Speaker 1:There's there's a, there's a part of me who says actually, kevin, you can't go, you can't do that. That would be wrong. Um, I will use it to change, perhaps, uh, extend an image if needed to be. But again, that that would. That would be for a presentation image, that wouldn't be for one which is there for show to display my work, to show what I'm capable of. So okay, so the clear, the clean answer is yes, I'll do anything with it, unless it's a picture which represents my work. So if I took a portrait of you and on that particular day, for some strange reason, let's say, I took a picture of another very attractive young lady I'll just say young, okay, it's all relative and she had some seriously crooked teeth yeah uh no my teeth are lovely, by the way.
Speaker 1:I paid a fortune yeah, that's why I said teeth, because I knew I didn't apply to you. But you see what I'm about to say I would do before ai anyway. So this is an interesting one. If you, if you're trying to become a, a portrait or a people photographer and you've got a website and you've also got clients who are hiring you, I tell people, I tell students, be prepared to do two versions of the same picture. There's a version you give to the client and that client probably giving you some directions about whether they want any kind of airbrush, brushing or not.
Speaker 1:You know you will quite commonly get oh, do you think you can get rid of some of those bags under my eyes or get rid of some of the chins, and they say it tongue-in-cheek. But if you do reduce them, don't get rid of them completely. They look stupid, but if you can reduce the appearance of them, they love you. However, if I then think, actually, that's a damn good picture would look great on the website, but it just needs see on a website. Your, it's your shop window and the pictures that appear on there, every single one of them without exception, should cause the viewer to go wow, yeah, any image which is below a wow picture, don't put it on, which means if you're doing people, everyone's got to look incredible. So you straighten teeth, you get rid of zits, you get rid of the glass eye, you know all that kind of stuff. Everyone has to look amazing. But for the person who paid you the money, you have to be very sensitive. No major changes. All changes are subtle. If they can see the changes. You've got it wrong.
Speaker 2:But I was doing that before ai come along, but now ai does it quicker yeah, um, I guess that kind of leads on to a much deeper conversation because, as as a woman, as a mother to young children, and particularly young girls I have a stepdaughter who's 26 and I have a daughter who's almost nine I I can't stand the flawless images of, of people you know, and one of my issues with AI is I totally get you know. I did a photo shoot recently and the the young girl bless, her hormones have kicked in. She's very spotty and I reduced the color of the spots so they weren't as prominent, but I didn't remove the spots and immediately I got a text from them saying can you get rid of all the spots? Fine, I'll get rid of all the spots. That's fine. They've asked for it. I'm happy to do it and I'm happy to have AI help me do that. But these kind of flawless images that AI is presenting.
Speaker 2:I asked AI to produce an image of me as an insurance broker. I run an insurance business with my husband. I have no images of me in a suit because that's not me. So I asked AI to do that for me and it produced three absolutely gorgeous images of me. I mean, I look 20 years younger. I look absolutely stunning, my hair's perfect, yeah, I'm slimmer and and I put these on my Instagram. Now my personal Instagram I get on average, I reckon, 10 15 likes when I post pictures of me and my family, because I predominantly use Facebook for family stuff. But I posted these images and I had 44 likes within an hour and one person sent me a private message and said is that you in those photos? And I went back and said no, it's not me. It's not me.
Speaker 2:I sent an app, 27 photos of me, and it produced these images that are flawless. I couldn't look like that, not even if I went on a keto diet and had, you know, love island style hair and makeup done. It's not me. And but that side of AI and photography worries me. You know, we we've come so far to move away from this. Everybody has to be flawless. You know, I think there was a.
Speaker 2:Somebody asked one of the AI. It might have been Midjourney, is it? That's an image AI creator. Somebody asked it to create the perfect woman and it produced this tiny, tiny, slender, little, perfectly blonde woman, you know, with blue eyes and okay, so everybody that's got brown eyes and dark hair. You're not perfect Like I. Just, I don't know. There's stuff about it that I think can be really dangerous and damaging to people, to people and that's not even starting on the media and the fake press and the images that are being created, for that, I mean. I said to you earlier, kevin, there was a picture in March of Donald Trump being arrested that got 6.7 million views because it was released the day. People were waiting to find out what the verdict was, whether he was being found guilty, and you know that's dangerous. You can't tell if that's a real image or not. It turns out. Luckily the guy, luckily the guy said oh, you know, I was bored waiting for the verdict so I created this image, but that text gets lost and people genuinely thought he had been arrested.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, and there is that side of it.
Speaker 1:There are some scoundrels who are using AI to create disruption in the social network scene and I look at most of these and I you and I can probably tell them to be honest, at this stage in the evolution of AI, they're still. Most of them are spotable, but the number of people who are completely taken in by them that's the problem that the the majority of people are taken in by them yeah, I don't know the percentages, but it could be as high as 70 or 80 percent.
Speaker 1:Looking at the reactions when you read people's comments, this question is is really big and we can only go around in circles here. Like most things, the internet is good and it's bad. Ai is good and it's bad. Broccoli is bad and it's bad.
Speaker 2:I like broccoli? No yeah.
Speaker 1:So the thing is with photographers, photographers. There is such a strong temptation, particularly among new photographers, to make a name for themselves, and if they can shortcut things with ai, I think some of them will. There are a lot of photographers out there who are dogmatically against it, quite vociferous, and it kind of typifies where most of humanity is at the moment polarized. Almost every issue under the sun. People are for or against Broccoli shepherd pie, broccoli chocolate, broccoli pastry, and I still don't know what the answer is. The answer is we'll find out in a few years' time whether we made a right decision?
Speaker 2:Yeah, or will we? Yeah, look, there are some great uses for AI, as you said, you know, using AI, you can use it for efficiency when you're editing your pictures Old photos, people that restore old images, that can use ai. That side of it is is brilliant, so it has to be used correctly indeed little over a year ago.
Speaker 1:Um topaz they've been playing around with ai for a while, but they only really made it big a little over a year ago and I was so impressed with their product that I became an affiliate for them. So people buy Topaz from one of my links. I get a couple of bob and it really isn't very much at all and they don't pay more for it, but I was. I was so genuinely impressed in the way that it can take a small snap tape and take it maybe from 100 years ago and blow it up to make an A3 printer. We're using AI. It takes the smallest amount of information and enlarges the whole thing and then, it reduces the background noise.
Speaker 1:It sharpens up blurred photographs. It's extraordinary 's. It's not perfect no ai system currently is but it will be, we know, given time, when arnold schwarzenegger comes back from the future to try and kill off the bad skynet. You know if those who know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about. Uh, I forgot what I was saying there. What was I talking about? You know what I'm talking about? Uh, forgot what I was saying there. What was I talking about? What was that you were talking about? Topaz, topaz, yes, yeah, so topaz is already using ai to take pictures like the ones you were just talking about and completely transforming them, but it doesn't take a huge amount of skill to do it. But then again it's. It's recovering a picture from past. I've done it with a number of old photographs myself that I took back when days of film and I transformed. The way they look looks fantastic, and I know it's a fake, but it still looks good at a glance and I'm, as a personal picture of me and my family are now long dead. I'm happy with that, yeah, but the temptation to completely falsify a photograph, it's there, isn't it?
Speaker 2:it is it is right. I have some questions for you, kevin, um go on so you've said that you use AI and you mentioned Firefly briefly, is that the only tool that you use or is there other software that you're currently experimenting with?
Speaker 1:In terms of pictures. So I'll use the AI in Photoshop, the AI in Lightroom, the AI in Copas and then Firefly. The only other AI I use are text-based. So I use ChatGPT, I use Gemini, which of course is Google's equivalent, and I have some other software which analyzes text and does much the same as a Zoom system. If I've got a large amount of text, it'll break it up, analyze it, or I could if I wanted to, but I haven't yet write all my blog posts using AI. I could just chat a little bit in there or feed it. What I could do and I would never do is get somebody else's blog post from another part of the world on the same subject, feed it into chat, gpt or into Gemini and say rewrite this in my style. I've instantly got a blog post. It hasn't cost me any work.
Speaker 2:I could do that, but I never would no, no, you can't steal other people's stuff, but it is great if you've got ideas to put in and have it. Create a blog post for you. 100 um. So how do you see it? How do you see it evolving um over the next five to ten years?
Speaker 1:I've no doubt that it's going to become more sophisticated and more realistic. I mean, most of them they can't do hands very well, if you noticed. Yeah, really badly, but that that'll get better and we'll get ai into camera.
Speaker 1:In fact, ai is already in some phones and it's a focusing system, so I understand on on big cameras, but I'm not overly concerned about it destroying photography, because people are still buying film cameras. It's having a resurgence, particularly among young people. Yeah, it's having a resurgence, particularly among young people. Yeah, and I myself I have a couple of mirrorless, three mirrorless cameras and a couple of DSLRs and I still really enjoy the simple DSLR. In comparison it is very unsophisticated, but there's a satisfaction I get from pressing a mechanical button here and mechanical click and just feeling that tactile feedback. It's really nice. And yet I go over to the mirrorless and I've got to learn so many things about the different focusing systems. My God and I'm going to upset some people here I'm so glad I don't own a Sony, because I've looked at the menu systems for the focusing systems on sony and, to be honest, I think I'd give up and take up knitting. Yeah, yeah, photography should not need to be that complicated yeah, keep it simple.
Speaker 2:I actually bought, um a film camera last year and I taught myself how to develop the photos just using YouTube and I loved it and it was such a sense of achievement when that first image appeared, because I, you know, I'm from a generation after you, so, um, I don't really remember film cameras. I mean, I remember taking cameras to boots and having the film developed, but that was not for very long. You know, we were into digital fairly quickly, um, and I loved that feeling when I developed that first photo. It was of my dog and when that image appeared, oh, it was amazing. You can't, you can't duplicate that no, no, the.
Speaker 1:We are a strange bunch. We love our technology, but we get romantic about the old stuff yeah, the stuff long before we were born. Do you ever watch that? Just diversify. Do you ever watch that tv program? Um, not workshop? Um, the repair shop, the repair shop. Love it. It's addictive, isn't it? I love it all those old skills yeah no technology involved there, no computers, no ai it's just wonderful.
Speaker 1:So I, if I have to and I think we probably do need to end the conversation. If I have to end the conversation on a positive note, it's the fact that it's pretty clear that most people really like simple things.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And they like the old things and because of that, I think cameras will always be around.
Speaker 1:They may not be around in the numbers that we see them at the moment, and obviously they're massively reduced ever since the iPhone came out, but I think there's always going to be people who love the idea of creating images from scratch. It's as simple as that, in the same way that people pick up a brush and steal watercolor or paint with oils or sculpture or or learn to play an instrument. These are old skills which you have to do yourself and you have to learn, and you have to spend days and weeks and months and years of practice to get any good at. There's a sense of personal achievement you get for working with this older technology. It's quite heartening, isn't it it is, it is I.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more with you that's good so just very, very, very quickly Go on For anybody listening who hasn't used AI in their photos yet, but they want to. They want to experiment. What advice would you give them?
Speaker 1:You know that I'm a great whiskey lover I do know that, yeah, you're gonna love this analogy.
Speaker 1:This is just plucked out the air, as you were. Just I'm not. You're gonna ask me this question. Um, it's a bit like when you've you've paid a lot of money for a single malt whiskey. You bought a bottle, it's a big investment, and what you don't do it's just glug it all back. You don't get you, just you restrain yourself so you enjoy the moment and then put it aside for another time and then if you want to drink more regularly, you're you're going to have lesser quality products. You keep the good stuff just for those times where you need it.
Speaker 1:And I say the same for AI Enjoy it, participate in it, get to understand it, but don't let it take control of you in the same way that a whiskey could do, and you could become an alcoholic. Of course and I certainly are I have maybe one whiskey a week, even though I've got a big collection and I love it. I hate getting drunk. To be frank, I hate hangovers, but the principle is the same and it applies to just about anything that the human race has embraced Moderation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes use it it, but moderation, don't let it control.
Speaker 1:You love it, perfect answer okay and relax well, that's a good session, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:yeah, it was it was um always a difficult one to talk about when there's so many opinions, but I think thanks for putting me on the spot as well you love it. You love being put on the spot. Thanks for showing me your knee yeah, I'll lay.
Speaker 1:I'll put a lovely, attractive body on the end of it. Next time I'll see you in a couple of weeks, we think we know what we're talking about. We have kind of made a list, don't we?
Speaker 2:we know we know what the next one's about?
Speaker 1:yeah, we're not going to give them any hints, but it'd be worth listening out for. Thank you everybody for listening.
Speaker 2:It's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from me until the next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to this week's tog talk. If you've got any questions you'd like me to read out on air, then check out the show note link below, simply called questions, and the link there will take you to an on-screen button. You press it, talk to your computer or to your phone, and you can dictate your question straight to me and then I can play that live on air. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to seeing you in a week's time for another solo edition where it's just me answering photographers questions.
