As Photography Has Truly Evolved...

The lines are, indeed, becoming blurred. As I explore the avenue of Artificial Intelligence (specifically images created from text prompts) I found I had to open a distinct account here to keep it totally separate from my traditional landscape/seascape photography.

Photography in the traditional sense ended in 1994 when digital cameras were widely available to the public.
With that came the digital software to go with it and PS 3.0 in 1994 was powerful with layers, etc....
It's not a knock on anything, it's just this specific art has evolved so much since then. IMO.
I'm sure others will differ and that's ok.
That's my take on it.

So true, Bill. I am not a fan of AI. To me, that is just too extreme for what I like to do. However, Photoshop and digital manipulation crosses lines as well. I am fine with the "digital paintbrush", because WE ARE actually using our hands in this particular craft, unlike AI which is just a command of words.

Photography is still photography.

Its what you add to it that makes it something else. Its mostly digital art.


Basically you could never trust a photo, they've been editing those things as soon as they were invented. The techniques changed, that's all. A photographer holds a camera and uses skill to create something. A digital artist, AI guy etc can't say they are a photographer when its just a line of text, even if it looks like a photo. Just like I can't call myself a painter if I run my thing through a painter program.

The only thing I would want an AI to do is to remove tricky things from the background, creating new content of what could have been there. Like remove a car but add the lower half of the window it blocked. Can't do that so easily with my tricks.


----Mike Savad

"Photography in the traditional sense ended in 1994 ... "

Definitely no. It only ended for those people, who made the decision for themselves to end with it.

I agree Mike, but you do not have to do AI to remove backgrounds. You can do this with the clone tool and a digital paintbrush, as you know, in photoshop, so you ARE using a paintbrush tool to do so unlike AI where you give the command in key words.

Agree Rudi!

IMPO, I think AI is all about being a good "creative writer". While this may be art, it is certainly not fine art.

I started AI a few days ago because at the moment I cannot go anywhere to take pictures but in my garden. I even don't have money to fill gasoline in my car. I would not call it photography. For me it's just another form of art and I want to try it. I would love to open another account for this like Bill says but again, it's not possible for me, I have zero income since covid. Let see the evolution. Maybe I will like it, love it or hate it

I know how to remove a background. But there are images that simply have no info to rebuild it on. Like if a post is blocking a sign. Or a car is blocking a part of the scene. I'd like to be able to fill in that info without having to rebuild it all. I'm pretty creative when it comes to cloning stuff out, but there is a limit and it takes a lot of time to rebuild the scene. I think it would be easier to say - remove the car, replace the sidewalk, window and add a dog. And see what pops up. I'm just using the most basic of photoshop tools to do my stuff in.... There are time I can see AI helping me. Creating the thing I have to make from scratch like animals doing people things. But it wouldn't run on my current machine, so all this is a ways off for me. Unless I win the lottery, which I never enter.


----Mike Savad

Mike, I say stick to what you do so well. You certainly do not need AI to be as talented as you are already!

I prefer a "hands on" approach". Call me old fashioned. But that's just me.

"What is called photography?" depends on who sets the rules.
Below are just two examples from our FAA life.

Here, at FAA, we have a "photography" category. Yet, without an enforced definition of what photography is - anybody makes up his own mind when they choose the category.

However, the situation is different with group admins. Some of them agree to accept photography with any editing. Still, some admins require only a minimal amount of editing.

To me, as an artist, I believe AI is more about "creative writing" than any hands on artwork. That's just my take. And funny enough, I majored in creative writing in college.

Well, everything is moving towards keyboards. Writers are not writers anymore; they are typists. Handwriting is certainly dying. We only writing on checks.

Nope, I don't write checks anymore.

I have Bill Pay that does that for me. Everything goes through Bill Pay, and they also do the accounting, putting the entry in the correct tax category.

My accountant loves it.

Photography, as its name says, is capturing an image by light. No matter of the recording, chemical or digital, enhancements are necessary to transform the radiometric recording into a photometric version suitable for human perception. The rest of manipulations is something else...nowadays we call it digital art. Substituting/altering the reality is not photography.

 

Has anyone here used Photoshop's content aware clone tool introduced in 2018?

In regard to AI, it's AI all the way. Adobe supercharges Photoshop’s content-aware fill so you have more options, fewer AI fails

Agree, Yuri!

Still photography as far as I’m concerned. I’m hoping some clever bod will produce a tool that can analyse a photograph and determine what percentage of it is fake, mainly to deter all of the overly Ai images that are likely to appear everywhere which will be claiming they’re genuine. People need to be able to determine what is real and what is fake.

@carmen - content aware is not AI. As it uses the original source to fill in detail. I can't get into why I ethically can't use AI.

I like the concept as a way of making digital art.

As far as Id'ing real from fake, that's hard. Look a models face in a magazine ad, in the past it was airbrushed, so you couldn't trust that. Now you can force her to smile, change her skin color, head shape, body contours etc. You can't trust that and its still a photo. Ideally everything will be seen as art. Even a documentary shot, if shot at a certain angle will make a block of crack den's look like a charming location if they shoot that one single house that isn't a crack den. Can't trust it even if they don't tweak it.

Even shots I call photos, i've removed things, changed summer trees into autumn, added fish to a pond, added people. As long as it still looks like a photo then it is. I guess.


----Mike Savad

Photography turned the art industry upside down over a century ago.

A pushbutton machine captured the analog intensity of photons with a literal silver lining with a stark reality so sought out by traditional painters of the same generation.
Traditional painting demand dropped dramatically as a result.

Generative AI is doing to photography what photography did to traditional painting a century ago. Traditional painting has endured and remains the benchmark to artistic comparitive analysis. Artists created utilizing both internal imagination and developmental skill beyond mechanized predetermined causal outcomes; both then and now.

The raw nature of captured reality (traditional photography) now has the cloud of doubt on all the modern media offerings. Traditional painting also cannot hide from the shadow of this same cloud.

"How to classify our art?" That's a great question.
Here's another, "Who is the art's author?"

Just like photographers' arms race to buy the best equipment, now the arms race is to buy the best AI.
Cha Ching Cha Ching goes the cach registers as the arms race continues: some things change exponentially while others remain the same.

As I might have said before...

... art is not the artefact.
Art is "not how its made"
(that is craft). Art is the
response to the made
object!

It matters not how
it is made!

This relatively new application of a decades old technology is a double edge sword.

It can be great if applied the right way or devastating if it is not

Now, all people have to do is to be honest about it. Too many are not. I see too many computer generated work on social media where people reply with "what a beautiful painting " or something along those lines and the posters (or should I say imposters?) are loving it.

That fight with painters Drew mentioned, was about a paycheck between commercial portrait painters and portrait photographers. Other types of photography, let alone photography as art, weren't really in the picture yet until pictorialism in the 1890ies. Traditional/analog photography had to fight to be recognized as art. 135 years later that fight is still not completely over. The main goal of the PSA for example is still "To promote the art and science of photography as a means of communication, image appreciation, and cultural exchange." Nothing about it is just nice to hang on your wall and enjoy. Digital photography lost that fight the day it started

There were 3 main events that put the professional photography world upside down and can probably be compared with what is going on today. The first one was when Kodak introduced the preloaded box camera. ("You push the button, we do the rest") The transition from Pictorialism to Straight or Pure Photography, which was truly an ugly war among photographers themselves, and to a somewhat lesser extend, the cell phone camera

In this case, commercial digital photographers and designers who specialize in product and advertising photography and design are probably the first victims of AI

Analog photography (film, wet plate collodion, tin type, etc.) will survive and might even come out on top. What also might survive are traditional printing techniques such as salt., platinum palladium, carbon, etc. no matter if that is done directly from an original large format negative or a digital negative.

Edit, I disagree with Jack. Even in the high end art world, it matters a lot what technique was used. Especially in flat art. (Many times, they even advertise with it and often digitally printed work that was not printed on a pigment printer is rejected for instance)

I hope this conversation doesn't fall into this rule: "No "is this art" or "what is art" threads."

Diana, I am also old fashioned when it comes to editing my photos! For me thats the best part. I love the process, and it can be a long one. But at the end the rewards are richer for me.

This for instance would remind you of a Norman Rockwell.

It is 3D though. It was created in PS making it far more related to photography than to an illustration on paper. The file format would be for any photograph the same.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1x8bYo

>"The final aesthetics are the heart of why we do any of it. . . . Here we are after all on a sales site."

Those two parts only sometimes go together. For example, if your goal is primarily sales, you could make CryptoPunks, which are not aesthetically pleasing. However, CryptoPunk #7523 was sold for $11.7 million this year.

Aesthetics as I am using them do not have to be beautiful. The romantic period over one hundred years ago insisted on beauty as the definition but in the last hundred years that shifted.

You can not do cryptopunks today and make any money for the most part. In the digital age things get over done when some makes money from it. Those following the first example do not get much.

Also there is the technical progression CryptoPunks was satirizing in the first place. That statement can not be made the same way twice.

To be crass,

If you want to get onto a new thing, you're TOO LATE

I love painting photos.

An image that I have photographed, and later digitally painted.

What should I classify it: Digital Art, Mix Media, or Photograph?

There is no 'photographic art' or 'AI' listed.


Edit: Yet, 'AI' can't be right, because I photographed the image.

Diana'

Addressing your question.

1. If your art comes from literally capturing light and creating an image, you are a Photographer

2. If your art comes from literally moving 1's & 0's around to create an image, you are a d"Digitographer ( I added the "o" to make it flow)


Edit:

I suppose if you use both to create an image, you might be either a:....

1. Digiphotographer

2, Photodigitographer


It depends on which discipline dominates

Roger,

It is not too late. The tools offer ways to make things differently out of some of the other ideas floating around.

You wont get much money if you do not get creative with your own themes.

Like paintings if you have something different to say there is more money in it at times.

Thanks Roger, I usually tell people that I am a photographer/digital artist. I always say the word "slash" LOL! Photographer is the main category with digital becoming a close second. Still, it is peculiar to have to describe myself that way, but it is what it is.

Maria, IMO if your work was digitally painted, it is digital art.
It does not have a real-world physical counterpart.

Thank you, Western.

Yeah, a photo that was painted - is a digital painting, which I think is what I call it. If I make it from scratch its digital art. If one were to make a painting using a drawing device you could call it - painted digitally...

But in the end the buyer never looks at that anyway. So it hardly matters what its called. It just matters what it looks like.

You are a photographer if you use a camera to get the image
you are a scanographer if you use a scanner to capture the image (scanography is a real field and there are some wild things people make).
And of course pyrographer the one the one that photographers accidentally use. That's where you burn wood into art.

But after that I guess one could say - AI-Photographer. AI-DigitalArt (with a hyphen or it looks like AL)


----Mike Savad

Oh, I thought pyrographers were the ones who throw their paintings into the woodstove.

Seriously though, I think Maria was wondering about the "Artwork Category" selection rather than how to describe her work in the "Media" box.
And while I agree that it is unlikely many people pay any attention to the Media description I can well imagine buyers entering the homepage is search of works (as opposed to through a direct or Google link) to use the "Artwork Category" filter to narrow down their search results.

AND again!

"But in the end the buyer never looks at that anyway. So it hardly matters what its called. "

Your opinion only. Not fact

Western, yes, they do occasionally

Fine my opinion, but based on my experience when I have people asking how I made that painting, can you teach me to paint, and then argue with me that its not a painting, I can say from my point of view - they don't look at that part of it.


----Mike Savad

You're not the site and you don't know about how many customers do what. People believe you do. Please add it's your opinion only to things, and not state as an overall fact, which it's absolutely not

"Perception often lags behind reality..." - John F. Kennedy

An interesting aspect to this is a guy who was a locally very famous photog back in the mid 20th century in Baltimore, A Aubrey Bodine. People then and now thought that his imagery was somehow "pure"....didn't know that in the pre-digital era, he edited the heck out of them, but with darkroom magic. They looked real, but, if he needed a shadow or a sky, or whatever, he pulled them out of his big pile of negatives and did the chemical equivalent of "layers". As it is in movies, where we don't actually bomb London again to make a WW II movie, so-called "realism" is mainly a matter of a convincing illusion. Anybody who knows much about how digital photography works knows that the first edit happens inside the camera before you even see the viewfinder image. There's no way to stop this, nor should we even try.

Judging by posts on Facebook, most people want images that are called photographs to be "real".

Also most people can't tell the difference between what's "real" and what isn't and get very offended when the find out that they've been fooled.

If an image is of a place, they want to be able to go there.

If it's a historical place or an event the want to be assured that it's accurate.

Too much image manipulation, without disclosure, upsets some people's sensibilities.

Of course they get offended if they are mislead.
All the rationalizations in the world doesn't mitigate false attribution and or misrepresentation.

> so-called "realism" is mainly a matter of a convincing illusion.

Good point, Doug. Most people don't realize all color photography is (and always has been) the art/science of making metamers.

In colorimetry, metamerism is a perceived matching of colors with different (nonmatching) spectral power distributions. Colors that match this way are called metamers.
- wikipedia

That is, all color photography is a convincing illusion. [I am, of course, thinking of generic everyday color photography, where the colors are adjusted to look like the original.]

"That is, all color photography is a convincing illusion"

Art is meant to be an illusion. What is your point?

Agree, Abbie... some people want to be very clear on what it is you have done and what they are buying.

"That is, all color photography is a convincing illusion"

Art is meant to be an illusion. What is your point?>>>>

The point is about people who think about photography as some sort of exercise in purism or realism as do some painters and millennia of illustrators. They call a photographic image a "capture". Personally, I reject the whole idea of realistic Truth (note the capital T). The choice of content, the actual process of digitizing an image and any edits we do means that it's my image, not Truth and, once we go into more extensive editing, add clouds, remove the vagrant in the background, change the colors, etc, it's not that different from painting except that it's accomplished by different technological means.

So, when you see my photo, you don't know what "really" was there. It can be completely unrealistic and fantasized, or it can appear like "truth" (lower case t), because I'm a clever deceiver with some software skill. If you think it's real, but I made it up, then it's a convincing illusion, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

"As Photography Has Truly Evolved...
It's hard to know what to call it any more. What to say? How to classify our art?"

If I am visiting a museum, I like to see what types of work are on display in various locations.
Photography almost always gets placed under one giant umbrella, unless it is an individual show,
which differs from the vast categories of paintings; realism, impressionism, pop, renaissance, gothic, etc.
Middle ages, modern (that started ~60+) years ago?, work of the 19th, 20th, 21st century, etc.
It is all visual art.

As long as someone is positively affected by my work, I don't care how it is classified, but I would like them to find it!

from my blog "About photography"

“Photography is not about what you see or how you see it, but about how you want to present it.” – Me

Does that mean that photography is an illusion?

Short answer: Yes and no. It depends.

Illusion...uhm...at the end any sensory perception is a sort of illusion, associated by the brain to stimuli it gets. But like this we got back to "all is art and art is everything". Photography for science cannot be deemed as illusion at all. It is one of the most objective tools in scientific research...therefore photography is not an illusion.

Photography - literally light writing, requires that photons, either reflected or emitted, are recorded by a light sensitive medium.

Not wholly created in a computer, whether by an image manipulation program or or text based program.