Your iPhone Doesn't Make You a Photographer (ft. Wayne Chasan)

People are valuing real human created content more now that AI is pervading everywhere.

Do you remember the first camera you used or the first camera you own?

Saw on Instagram the other day. They were giving out a prompt for, you know, how to turn any picture into a professional looking bio shot. Here's the prompt to use. You know, feed it your picture and use this prompt and you'll get a professional looking studio. Boom.

There was already a year or two ago talking about these AI and photo things. There was photography contest where the guy who won first place for portraits as soon as it was announced said this is not a photograph. This was AI.

AI hype or help.

Good day and welcome to the show. I'm your host Pete Cooper and our topic is AI hype or help. Today's guest is Wayne Chasan. Wayne is a photographer, a professional photographer who has over four decades of experience, taking it right back to the good old days of analog and film, right through all the digital revolution and now into the AI revolution. So, we're going to learn about photography and how that has been impacted by AI. Let's get into it.

Welcome, Wayne. Welcome to the show. Nice to see you again. Thank you kindly. It's great to be here.

Yes. Yes. We've just come out of, you know, a fabulous year 2025. Wow. I mean, what changes we've seen and you and I met, was it 2024?

So, 80 months now through our networking grouped. Gosh, we're seeing some changes together. So, let's start by talking a little bit about your background, Wayne. Tell us a little bit about you, what you do.

Okay. Well, uh, professionally, first of all, I'm an American born in the States, but I've spent most of my life in Spain. An interesting point, I work really well sort of on a multinational level between the States and Spanish-sp speakaking countries in Europe. And where am I going with that? Well, I'm actually professionally a very experienced architectural and interiors photographer. I've been doing that for over 40 years.

I had 25 years of training in uh when you had to get the picture perfect in the analog times in the analog world where you know you would have to light everything and set everything up and there was no way that you could mix and match or change after the fact if you had used a Polaroid to test an image and left it in the scene somewhere in your interior. Maybe the stylist or somebody left the Polaroid on top of a table and that was in the shot that was in the shot. So everything had to be absolutely perfect. It was great training.

It was great training and I think it uh actually gives me an advantage within the world of people who've come in and trained in the last few decades directly in the digital world because you don't need to be that precise. You don't need to be that methodical. You don't need to achieve that perfection on the scene. Mhm.

So, the mix for me, the mix of the two has been incredible because I had a great tough learning process where everything had to be spot on. And now I've been given the tools to do at this point pretty much anything you want to after the fact.

So, deciding what combination of the two factors to use in every single shot you take is an amazing uh tool.

Do you remember the first camera you used or the first camera camera you owned? I can remember. So when you answer, I'm going to answer as well. We'll compare notes.

Uh yeah. Well, the first one I owned Canon.

Yes.

It was a long hard process to be honest. You know, it was back in the day it was kind of Canon or Nikon. And when you're starting out, it was like how the heck do I make this choice? You know, the Nikon people tell you Nikon, the Canon people tell you Canon. And in the end, you just kind of had to make the best evaluation you could without really knowing what you were doing.

Of course, nowadays we have internet and we have a, you know, ChatGPT and we have everything else out there to help us make those decisions, but back then it was a real battle.

So, it was an SLR, right? A Canon SLR. That was your first.

Okay.

That was my first and it was obviously a film camera.

It was a very simple film camera. You know, it basically just had its shutter button and uh you know, not many ch frills on it. You know, it was a very simple camera. Now the difference also between the analog world and the digital world. I continued to use my first camera, my very first camera well into my professional career as a backup body because the quality was not in the body.

The quality was in the lens and on the film.

Mhm.

Which were relevant to the body. So as long as you didn't need it to do anything fancy for you, you just needed get a properly exposed shot, you could still use a camera 20, 30 years later that you had been using. Whereas now cameras become obsolete as soon as the sensor becomes outdated.

Right?

So as far as amortization and you know having a a profit scenario within the business within the industry you really have to keep in mind that in you know in the old days your equipment could last decades whereas now that's certainly you know out the window.

So, I don't know how how young or old the audience experienced they are with cameras, but SLR stands for single lens reflex. And that means that when you look through the lens, you're seeing the film is going to see when you hit the button, right? Because it switches a mirror system. Is that Have I got that right?

Absolutely right. The image goes uh through the lens onto a a mirror and reflects up through into the visor so that you're looking at it. But the moment you press the shutter, that mirror had to flip out of the way and let the light go through to hit the film and then back down so you could see again.

Right?

Of course nowadays with what they call mirrorless cameras, which are, you know, what's being used now, there is no physical mirror in there. They literally have an electronic visor that is recreating the image for you

at the top. So the image is always going straight from the lens to the sensor.

Uh so yeah, interesting. You you started your career with or you started your photography journey with a a very nice camera, an SLR.

My dad had an SLR and when he would take the family photos, it was always a big setup process that would where he would, you know, try this and try that and try this and try that uh until he got it set up and he had a timer on it and we'd get the family photos through his SLR and his stand and everything. Seemed very complex and hard to use and we're always waiting there, you know, come on dad, let's get the photo out of the way. And he'd try one, it didn't work. He'd try another one about three or four shots in would get something reasonable.

Well, the other thing was he wasn't seeing what he was getting. Now, you can look at it and say, "Yeah, that's good. That's not good.

" But then it was, "Let's find out in a few days when it comes back from the lab if we blew it or we nailed it. "

Yes, someone's looking over here or not smiling on something. But my first camera that I purchased, I did have another camera that was given to me was so old, I don't even know. It was one of these things that you kind of fold out Constantine. I think I still got it. I think it kind of worked. Uh must have been from the 60s or something, but I was buying a camera in the ' 70s and it was a little agart film in it.

And I remember this this going to the shops with my father to to find the places where we could get it cheapest.

And it was so much fun shopping with him as he taught me how to find the best deal. We spent a few hours shopping and I remember being so excited that we'd saved like from it was like $32 from memory and I think we got it for $31. I was so excited that we shopped around and got a good deal. Unfortunately, that camera which I loved. I took skiing uh and then it got either stolen or or misplaced when we were out doing sort of a presentation show. We we never saw it again. And the thing is I loved I love cameras and I loved that camera and um unfortunately it didn't live very long in my life. Oh, well, don't feel bad.

I took that very first camera I purchased and on my first day of vacation in the summer, I was so anxious to do something creative and unplug that I put it into a plastic waterproof casing that I had and went into the pool with it to have some fun and take some pictures without bothering to take the precaution of testing that the waterproof bag, which I didn't normally use, was still secure. It had it had cracked and it filled with water and I've still got the camera, but it's not really functional. I have it the second one I bought the same model which still functions but that very very first one um yeah things happen.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean when I teach photography sorry when I teach photography you know rarely but when I've done that the first thing I tell people is make sure you have your batteries fully charged. You have backup batteries. Make sure that your you have enough memory in your cards. You know you're not going to get a picture if you don't have a battery and and a memory card in in today's world of photography. So,

you know, make sure those basic things are taken care of like double checking that your waterproof bag is

waterproof.

So, you travel the world doing photography for people and you've been doing it said 25 years and there's still a market for that.

So,

sorry I'm I'm sorry to correct 42 years

almost. Sorry, I'm so sorry. 42 years.

25 25 years of analog, 20 years of of digital basically.

Wow.

Well, I'm sorry. What changed you there? I with great pride and honor.

I just have to add that I started really young because otherwise people look at me a bit funny.

Yes, exactly. I get the same thing. So there's still a need for people like you with your skills to be shipped around the world one of a better word and and take uh good photography for people.

So even though we are all using cell phones now and you know I can even go to a restaurant and ask anybody who's serving me can they take a picture for me and they do a reasonably good job of taking a picture for me and they'll take two or three or do you want a landscape and you know they're very happy and it's easy to do that. That's something that's really changed in my lifetime. You you I couldn't couldn't have dreamt of asking a server to take my SLR or my AG phone and get a photo of me and my family. Now it's just anybody will do it.

So

that begs the question why do we need why do we you know why is there still a market for someone like you I mean that I mean make it clear to to everybody here why why is there still a need

okay so it it is absolutely true what you're saying uh photography even before AI and we will get to AI we have time um but be you know even before AI already has been going through these massive technological changes and it it's not like any of this is new this has been going on since the invention of photography which you know used to be on glass plates and with you know bellow type cameras and then then suddenly you had the DSLRs people could actually move around with the cameras and you know

there's always been innovations and changes and there's always been resistance to them from the people who were masters of using the the equipment that came before. So that that's nothing new. What has happened is that everything has become automatic. You know you used to have to worry about your exposure exposure is automatic. You used to have to worry about the filters you used because of the color of the light that was in the scene. Uh automatic white balance is now being done. You even uh you had to worry about the contrast of the whether there were areas that were too dark or too bright to be captured on one piece of film within your scene.

So you had to choose uh whether to expose for the bright or the dark areas and lose the other one or balance it somehow with artificial lighting or reflectors or something or choosing a different time of day. All these things are basically also being taken care of now like with uh iPhones. They're automatically taking HDR pictures. They're automatically taking several darker and lighter frames and blending them for you when you're looking at the result is basically what's going on instantaneously behind the scenes.

So the the technique and this was interesting when I looked up a little little bit about you know I asked ChatGPT which I've only started using recently you know what what sort of things could be brought up here and had a very interesting point Jack GBT told me skill scarcity used to be what made photographers necessary there was a scarcity of people who had the skills to take a good picture.

Yes. And that's now being replaced, AI was telling me, by taste and judgment.

And that's where I'm going with my answer. People still need professionals like me because anybody can take a picture now.

Mhm.

Does that mean it will be good or great or what you need to achieve your purpose or sell your product? No, it it doesn't. What do I bring along? I bring along 42 years of experience as mentioned going through having to make the perfect picture all the time to having to capture what I know I can turn into an amazing picture in post-prouction now in the digital world.

Mhm.

Um sorry and I've lost my train of thought there with that. No, no, that I'm able to do that.

Whereas, yes, there are millions of pictures that uh are amazing taken by non-professional people,

but a lot of it happens to be that that's their one lucky shot because they were in the right place at the right time in the right conditions.

It doesn't mean they can repeat that excellence of photography in every single frame that they take.

Yes. And that's why I get called in to either consult with companies that may even have their own internal teams of photographers, but they're not producing a good enough result. Uh, one of my largest clients has me doing that for them. They're great photographers.

They're great people, but they're not trained architectural interior photographers. So, a lot of what I'm doing now sometimes is uh doing consulting over Zooms and PDFs and and phone calls with them in advance of the work that they're doing. And then they'll fly me in to kind of there's things that you just can't see in architectural photography without being on the ground. A lot of what I do is adapt to what I see and the light at that moment,

right? Um, so for example, I they flew me into this uh this building in Puerto Rico recently and then onto Florida after that.

We had already consulted about improving the images that they were taking, but I flew in to get my feet on the ground and see what might be missing that I couldn't perceive from the material they were sending me and do a day or two of photography to add to that and finish consulting with them. And also so they could learn from my experience because to me it's all intuitive. I've been doing this so long now that it's even hard for me to explain sometimes how I do it because it's just comes from intuitive experience.

So, I get it. I I think you made a really good point there. I'm just trying to think of the differences between my scenario where, you know, I'm at the restaurant.

What I'm trying to do with most of the pictures that I take on my phone is capture a moment, right? It's it's it's uh helping extend that experience by having it memorialized and I can share it and I can say, "Hey, we were here. Remember we went, you know, you can share the experience. It's about fundamentally it's about the relationship, right? I guess it's the relationship with with my wife if dinner or with my friends if I'm sharing something like that. And I'm not so critical about

the image itself.

Yes. Of the technical aspects of the image, right?

And and that's why it's amazing.

I've got nothing against all the technological advances that have happened in photography, making it easier for everyone. I mean, I produced a video when I was 14 at the largest uh video studios in the San Francisco Bay area and won an award in the local San Francisco Bay Area Awards that year, but it it was because I was the only 14-year-old with access to professional equipment and editing studios.

I made the sci-fi flick right after Star Wars came out because I could. The fact that any child nowadays can have that same level of production value in capturing and in editing their material uh or more far more than I had on their phone is amazing.

I think that's wonderful uh for everybody and and I wanted to mention one thing about what you were saying about documenting. Now this has nothing to do with AI but I just need to say about pictures. Every single thing that you capture, film, video, and this is going to take us to AI. Film, video, anything you capture visually is instantly historic. You may not know it at the time, but over my decades and through my life, I have seen that things basically can't be repeated. Unless it's a white background with this lighting setup that you can totally replicate, nothing will ever come out exactly the same. M

no the moment that you capture with a loved one.

You go back to the same spot another day. The light has changed a different time of day. The clouds are different. The sky is different. Your body position is different. I once I recreated some iconic shots for an advertising campaign, you know, like the the V-Day kiss in Time Square and and Marilyn Monroe's dress blowing and all that. And they were using their own staff as models on their location.

Mhm. Just because of people's different bodybuilds and height, it was impossible to recreate the exact same body position,

right?

I shot a job once that was, long story, I'm not going to tell it now. It was developed the wrong way.

I shot it on negative, which I normally didn't use, and it was developed in the slide process, which we, my lab normally did for me. Big comedy of errors. So when I went to reshoot it two weeks later, I used the ruined negatives as a guide to just repeat the same thing because I was so heartbroken. This is one of those rare events in my 40 years where, you know, that everything went wrong.

Yeah.

Well, by the end of the day, following the exact same guide and path, the light had changed and I wasn't able to recreate the same picture at this more or less the same time because the sun had left the room or was

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, everything you shoot is historical.

And to get a little bit, you know, on the sad side of things, people leave us.

And, you know, hillsides, I took a picture in the 80s of a hillside at sunset in Spain. That hillside no longer exists. It was it was ripped down by a mining operation.

Oh, wow. The whole landscape,

nothing is permanent. And every picture you take or every video take is a unique historical thing, even if 40 years haven't passed yet. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, that's

And where does this take me to go to AI? Let me go to AI for a second.

Yeah.

We as as a society, as human beings, as as a civilization up until now, you know, since the invention of photography at least, we assume a visual image is based on reality. Of course, we've always been able to manipulate it. We choose the moment, we choose the angle, we choose the lens, we choose the lighting, or we don't choose it. But it's always based on a reality. You know that a photo happened.

Mhm.

Okay. And a video happened. And so this is something I definitely want to talk about with AI because to me it's the biggest concern. We're now seeing images that look like photographs and look like video. They may be over the top. Okay?

If you see a horse with wings flying, you know it's not a real photo,

but you know they they can look and they will now always be able to look like a real image. How do we cope with that as a society where we just unconsciously assume that what we're seeing, you know, if we don't have time to think about it is true, just based on reality and fact.

Now, when Photoshop came out,

I really felt that there needed to be a stamp like the trademark or the copyright symbol that went on every image that was photoshopped. And we have to deal with that whole thing about, you know, the beauty uh uh people false standards of beauty that aren't achievable in real life.

Forget the slim women, but perfect skin people or, you know, no wrinkles, things that these people have anyway and they're being retouched out. I thought that should be marked.

That didn't happen. But with AI, it must happen because it's going to take us a generation at least

to get used to the fact that we have to question every image we see. We no longer approach it from a position of this is more or less real. We have to approach it from a position of where is this source? What's the source of this information I'm seeing?

And can I trust it to be based on something more or less in the real world or is it an altered image or is it totally created out of nothing to do

with a real scenario?

Well, there's a very um there's a very classic kind of case of that with Will Smith eating spaghetti. I don't know if you've seen that. No,

it's actually a video and over the years they've shown how

how so much better that video looks and acts like Will Smith eating spaghetti. Back in the day, his mouth was moving all over the place and it was just literally really weird to watch a guy eating spaghetti. Now it's getting to the point where Will Smith is eating spaghetti. It looks completely believable.

And just the nuance on that is that they now have enough training on Will Smith in order to train the model to create something realistic. It's quite challenging. The mouths are quite challenging to do for AI because

they you know you you use your mouth a lot and there's a lot of different variables and often you don't show your full teeth right like that. Um and that's very because there's not a lot of training material there. The AI can't pick up and do a very good job with that. So mouths have been very challenging. So spaghetti and mouths and Will Smith, anybody that's interested, go and have a look at that.

So that that that's something that that concerns me about AI and I know that there are movements to uh detect whether images and videos are AI produced and there definitely some of the larger corporations are working on that, but I can only assume I can only pray that that will be widespread and successful enough for us to have some way to identify what's based on reality. I think I my prediction is that it's going to be a kind of an arms race, you know, one of these things where there's a breakthrough in developing the technology to make images look real and then there's a breakthrough in in catching it and it's just just going to there's going to be this back and forward.

We've seen that, you know, so many times.

Yeah. I mean, we see it in the cyber security world. You know, somebody's found out we had a, you know, a vulnerability exposed to us at a new thing and we ended up having a $2, 000 bill from it.

Um which we managed to manage but you know there was this this constant arms race on the cyber security side of things and we were all seeing the movement of what used to be simple passwords were fine now you have to have OTP and you have to have pass keys and all the other things I think we're going to see the same thing across a lot of the AI anything that's touched by AI needs to have a um authenticity associated with it integrity associated with it and I think that's going to lag and we're going to see vulnerabilities but I think you've got a very good point can we actually identify images that are um you know independently I

I think from our own visual viewpoint at this point it's

possible

but within a matter of no time at all as everything happens exponentially that that window of opportunity or moment will pass and we won't be able to visually distinguish in most cases

I think you're right I think it's going to

we may have to summize b you know guess oh this doesn't look like it's a realistic scenario

yes

so I think we're really counting on the metadata And the tools that Google or Meta or whoever are implementing them use to identify that or or to be able to warn us.

Exactly.

Or we have a service dedicated niche services like uh we do with you know I'm running various tools to help me with passwords and cyber protection and VPNs and all that sort of stuff.

Dedicated services which we apply to this stuff and we say yeah I think there's an 80% chance that's AI generated

you know whatever you know we can invoke those I mean a lot of times I don't really care like I talked about the images from that I take myself and my wife takes we're only capturing the moments

but there are times when it's important I mean I think if there's uh captured by in a crime or something like that

exactly evidence in a crime proof of something uh I know some manufacturers are building in systems that actually uh authenticate the image from camera to delivery.

Uh I forget whether that was Fuji or Canon, but I know they're working on that as well, but that will probably only be used for forensic purposes and not

perhaps in journalism in general. I mean, there was a case a long time ago where I remember I don't remember what news source it was, but they fired a photographer because he hadn't retouched the scene, but it was, I think, a soldier with the machine gun and some people, and he had used the soldier with the machine gun in one position from one frame and put it into a different frame where he was in a different position. Basically, they were two real frames, but he mixed them.

Oh,

and again, that can change everything.

The way someone's looking at you, you know, from one millisecond to another, the expression changes so much. The fact that he maybe decides to use your expression from, you know, half a second later

uh to the overall shot from half a second before can change the meaning of the image.

Yes.

So, of course, you know, even though it was based on on two real pictures, it was a collage of the two, a mix of the two.

Yes. It's changing the intent, his intent perhaps in the one frame he was just holding a gun and he was passively looking at the crowd. And another one he's angry and pointing the gun at the crowd,

right? Or holding the gun at a different angle or or whatever.

There was already a year or two ago talking about these AIM photo things, there was a photography contest where the the guy who won first place for portraits, as soon as it was announced said, "This is not a photograph. This was AI. " He had run it through the contest to see if the judges would detect it. This was probably about two years ago now.

Yes.

Remember something like that

renounced I believe renounced the award and all this that the other but it was you know it was a great taste of what was to come

you brought up an interesting solution that I'd never thought of but the idea of having the camera register in the image somehow having that sort of a locked key that goes with the image um that authenticates aspects of where and how and so on that could be done and that could be done by the manufacturers like the apples of the world you So they could invoke this um you know authenticity that when you take that picture

it it was a real picture taken by that phone at that time in that location and that could be locked away with

the image

there. I wish I could remember which manufacturer was working on it now as it's something that I don't need myself. I haven't really paid attention to it but I seem to remember it might have been Sony Fuji Cannon I believe

was on to that. They're probably all on to that. Yes, we see something an interesting point slightly unrelated, but I I' I've been seeing already that AI has been apparently backfiring in advertising campaigns that there's a huge public reaction

to AI produced material and people are now and and it affects me in the sense that people are now looking for imperfect photography and video because it it it kind of helps prove that it's real.

Yes.

I mean, for example, I I I I've for a long time, aside from my Instagram and my LinkedIn and my Facebook and the few things I put up on YouTube, I really have been wanting to create some episodes on my YouTube channel, like weekly telling the story behind images because just as I'm passionate about creating the imagery, I'm also passionate about teaching or sharing the stories behind them. And every image has a story. Uh whether it's a a technical anecdote, how you solved a situation or a logistical issue that came up or how everything went wrong and you fix you got it anyway or something humorous, you know, and I I really hope to do that this year.

Um and they were and I asked ChatGPT, like I said, I've just started using ChatGPT recently. I said, you know, hey, I've got I'd like to do this. You know, how viable is this that it might be successful or produce any kind of income or or and it gave me a couple pointers and one thing really interesting. It said, do the whole thing in one take. Don't cut out any bloopers or problems unless it's a big l big empty space or a major error.

Keep your fumbles and bumbles and little because people are valuing real human created content more now that AI is pervading everywhere and I've even recently heard the expression AI slot you know I mean like literally and all of a sudden I'm seeing that phrase everywhere

yes

so I think human created contact content showing imperfections and errors

which will probably be recreated by AI that's right they will chase that they'll start chasing that just like they were creating these making of scenes like like behind the scenes in Hollywood making of X movie or X series and it was but it was all created by AI. There was no real making of they were just recreating the making of yes.

So I've got nothing against any of the tools. In fact, I'm using some very very basic AI tools even within Photoshop. They're being integrated into Photoshop and they make life easier. Well, tell us about those AI tools that you used, Wayne.

Okay. So, I mean, AI can do anything like you say, right? Let's not go to the point of creating images out of nothing, but like what I've seen coming and being talked about and is definitely like here now. Talk about a model shoot.

You know, I I was doing some model photography and somebody said, you know, now there's a software that if you take some pictures of the dress on a hanger

from a few different angles, you then feed it into machine and say, I want this dress on a Chinese model in a field of wheat at sunset in Kansas, uh, you know, in this angle and position. And it will do that with this picture of the dress you took with your iPhone or whatever, you know, on on a hanger. That that was kind of amazing. Well, that that's definitely here. I I just ran into a colleague the other day,

and he mentioned what he was doing, which I had been seeing on his Instagram.

Apparently, he's using real models, but he's setting them in scenes in Moscow or scenes on the moon or scenes in New York without having to pay the cost of taking a whole team there to do it.

That's amazing.

What tool is that, Wayne? Do you remember what

I don't He did He didn't actually tell me. Um,

well, if you find out we'll drop it in the description from the

I will ask him. Let me make a note of that. Let me ask you.

I mean, I could I I have some ideas for using that from from my business, you know. Yeah, I just need that creativity.

It's amazing because it's it's a mix of the photographers's talent and AI's talent.

It doesn't necessarily have to be entirely produced with AI. Of course, if you want to get rid of the models and drive more people out of business, you can also use AI created models instead of real models. Now, another thing that I heard being talked about years ago by another photographer who was

I work kind of as an artisan. Uh I

What's that?

You know, it's interest. And sorry, I may be mispronouncing it because I've been in Spain so many years. Artisan.

It's It's like handmade. My images are handmade. I

you know, when I go to photograph a house, it's like a safari.

I'm I I'm chasing the light as it moves around because using the light to your advantage makes creating beautiful images easy and cheap and wonderful for everyone. Whereas working against the light or against the conditions,

you can still get an amazing shot. It just means you have to put more time and work into it, which is more money. So,

when possible, I'm always working the easiest, best way possible.

Yes.

And so, I'm flowing through a house. It's a creative process from the time the sun comes up till not the time the sun goes down till we go through the twilight and blue hour and you know when the sky goes totally black.

Yes.

Then I stop

because it stops being glamorous and it becomes kind of gloomy.

Yes.

I won't go into that deeply now. So years ago, I ran into a competitor who's got a great business setup and does it a bit more like, you know, bang bang going through multiple jobs. And he said to me at the time, there's this software coming out that can take a daylight shot and make it look like a nighttime scene. We're talking about a property. I mean, how do you change daytime conditions?

Even in in in Hollywood, you can tell when they're doing a a night scene at daytime because it's kind of like very bluish but a little too bright and there's a little too much contrast in far in the background because you know the sun's hitting there but they're hiding it. Now this and and that's really possible. In fact, the other day I was just seeing a software I had written down the name but I don't have it handy that was claiming it was shown it was taking a scene out of Pulp Fiction and it was showing you you know an actor standing there and they were saying okay I want it lit from behind. I want a revolving light around him. I want red lights. I want blue lights.

I want an overhead light. And it was taking the scene from Pulp Fiction and totally changing the lighting setup, angles, colors, intensities to your taste. I mean, that's totally AI produced. Imagine

imagine the level of what you can do, what what the general public can do, not a a seasoned professional like me and others.

Yes.

What is now being put in the hands of the general public and that's where we go from the skill scarcity to the taste judgment to differentiate us and obviously a lot of the mid-range photographers are going to be in in serious trouble

but that takes us right back to something you said earlier that just reminded me and that is the and we were talking about you know purpose we talked about the personal purpose but then the business purpose and I think of uh shows like Top Gear uh where they famous, you know, show, car show, and they'll have the guys talking, then they'll talk about the car, and then they'll do this thing they call the pretties, where they have the video camera swinging

around making this be this car look so beautiful with the light coming off it and so forth. Um, that's something that I think the average person couldn't do. That's and and what it does is it really sells, I guess, the the beauty, the aesthetic of what it is that they're presenting. Am I getting the point?

Absolutely. And and and certain yes you are and certain things are far more difficult to do that with than others. So in other words, a car which is all reflective and transparent surfaces to a large extent

is exceptionally difficult.

Architecture and interiors

has historically been one of the most difficult also because of the contrast between the outside light and the inside light. So when you want to see a room with amazing views, which everyone where I live here in in sunny Spain and you know big tourist resortba wants to see the views outside where which is so integrated into our life and is so spectacular that used to only be achievable by a few practiced professionals whereas an iPhone can basically create that for you now and then you can even enhance it more in post-production if it didn't quite get good enough.

Right? So that back to that technology the HDR two frame thing.

So, we skipped over that, but I guess for the audience, um, we were doing this stuff. I don't know whether you know, but I was back back in the day working for Nokia of the very first cameras, and we came across the noise issues with these tiny little CMOS cameras. And one of the tricks we used was this multi-framing kind of technology where you can have a short exposure and a long exposure, the two images, and then the short exposure is good for the bright scenes, and the long exposure is good for the dark scenes. And now you can bring those two together. That's what we're talking about with the HDR stuff.

Exposure, exposure fusion or HDR.

HDR has connotations a bit of that sort of grungy HDR look, which was very popular for a while because it was an amazing tool that came out, but you know, can be frowned upon by some. Uh, exposure fusion is a more elegant way of saying basically the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. HDR could actually be applied to a single image which tends to get a bit more fake and artificial looking as opposed to exposure fusion where you're taking multiple identical images that are just brighter or darker and combining them.

Yes. Right. And maybe we didn't say what HDR stands for. It stands for high dynamic range, doesn't it? Yeah,

indeed.

So, basically to sum that up really quickly because I we still haven't even gotten to my Photoshop tools. Um, HDR is necessary uh because in the old days film and now sensors are not capable of the same latitude, the same range of light intensity that our eyes and brain because it's a combination of the eye and brain functioning together are capable. So you walk into a very dim room with a very sunny bright view and your brain balances the values. Your eye perceives it and your brain balances it and gives you an HDR image already produced.

Yeah,

film could not do that. It had like a I think if I remember correctly, it was like an eight stop range.

Your eyes maybe get to I'm making this up now. It's been so long since I taught this, but it was maybe 25 stops of light difference that the brain and I could kind of get into an image, whereas film was maybe 8 to 10. And now uh digital in one frame is maybe around 15 up or down depending on the sensor. But it's still not to where the eye brain brain is. So when you want to recreate what your eye is seeing,

the way your brain is perceiving it, you need to do an exposure fusion or HDR effect if you want to recreate that sort of visual

depending on the circumstances. If it's a contrasty or or not contrasty image.

Yeah.

So I was um fortunate enough to know somebody who's working very heavily and deeply into these sensors and they're working on HDR. Not only this this what did you call exposure fusion but this technique where they allow each individual pixel to um so

that triple exposure. Yeah.

Well no this is actually allowing it to to bleed out like if you have too much uh exposure then it just goes to the top of the pixels value and you don't get any image. They were allowing it to sort of bleed out into a capacitor. Every single pixel has its own little capacitor uh which takes a little bit of that extra energy and bleeds it out. And we actually tested it here in in my room here in my office.

And the image looks kind of weird because it's so flat, right? It doesn't have that range of colors that you're kind of used to. It took me a little while to get used but to get used to it, but very useful especially for things like AI because you you know you still got all the information there. AI doesn't care what it looks like aesthetically. Like DLOG in video when when you shoot video they want, you know, if you want to be able to grade it to do post-prouction on it later, you shoot very very flat in color and contrast,

but you later apply a grading to it to create this sort of scene that we'd want.

But it gives you much more control and information than if you

it basically it's like in photography we have raw files and processed files and they literally can be compared to food. It's like having raw raw food or processed food. If I have the raw material, how I make the soup, the salad, the sandwich, or whatever I'm making is how I cook it and flavor it with these ingredients, with these raw ingredients. A

processed image is like processed food.

It's it's prepared for you. Just heat it in the microwave. That's what it looks like. That's what it tastes like.

So, when you get a JPEG or a TIFF file, that's a processed file.

The the conditions the photographer wanted or the camera took have been baked into it. You can alter them in Photoshop, but it's a destructive

uh change of the pixels. Whereas in the RAW file, you have all the information that could be captured at the scene and you later apply your recipe to it and output it into one of these fixed files the way you want it to look and you can change that and redo it at any time.

Yeah, it's it's fascinating.

We're seeing it not I mean I've seen the steady progress of photography um and particularly around the CMOS technology and how that's advanced. But just to back just to give the audience an understanding of the applications for that technology.

They were going to use it for uh cars where cars have cameras. We all know self-driving and and tech and things like that where you are have to see where you see a traffic light but there's a sun behind it. They were able to show me that a regular camera cannot even see the color of the traffic light because of the background being so bright. But with their technology they could still see the colors of the traffic light. So, it's very important for an an AI or a computer or machine to actually see those red a yellow green traffic lights and this technology is coming.

Well, thanks Wayne for letting me explain that. So, let's get back to AI tools. I think that's Photoshop really key topic.

Yeah,

Photoshop uh has already integrated tools and I'm not even talking about their beta ver beta version which is out there which is more AI uh in it to play with but just within this the conventional updated Photoshop which I'm using for example some things that have been life changers for me because I was not trained in uh into u you know Photoshop I really wasn't I was coming from that situation where I made the perfect slide at the time and when we shifted over to digital I just kind of did it like a cowboy, you know, when when my first assistant

who we were shooting digital with left, I said, "Sit down with me for half a day and show me the stuff we're doing because you've been

doing it and I I need to know how to deal with it. " Anyhow,

yeah,

amazing things that we can do now that used to take a huge amount of work. And yet another group that's been affected by this, retouchers, you know, like photographers are losing work because everything is becoming automated. Retouchers are losing work because everything is becoming easy and automated. So, for example, you want to swap out a sky. Photoshop basically does it for you. Now, it's called sky replacement within Photoshop.

You go to your image, you go to wherever it is in the menu, sky replacement, and it automatically masks detects the sky around trees, buildings, people, hair, you know, does a pretty darn good job of it. And then gives you a series of of uh included options that you can swap out for stormy, blue, cloudy, sunset, nighttime skies, or you can add your own photographs to it and swap those skies out. And it will kind of blend your original image to the tones and luminosity of the sky that it's using so that it doesn't look totally artificial.

M

so I'll use that as a great tool to save me time because I masking was not one of the things I did best to separate the sky from everything else

and then I'll go back

found that very difficult too.

Yeah. No, it's that easy. It does it for you now. But what I will do is go in and put that Photoshop version on top of my original image and kind of erase away the areas that I don't like what Photoshop did in the area that bleeds over the blending area.

Oh, okay.

Because usually, for example, if you have a building, the top of a building close to the sky, and let's say it's a blue sky, that blue cast will be put onto the building so it looks like it matches, but I may not want it there.

It may look at that look too sad or smudgy to me. So, you know, sometimes I'll let it change the sky and then I'll go in and and kind of decide how much I want the surrounding areas affected.

Yeah.

Just kind of erase that away. Another amazing amazing thing is is generative fill and generative scale. And you can do this generative fill without using AI credits in a simple way.

And you can also uh use it in a way that it does eat into your credits um if it becomes more complex. What does this mean? It means I can let's again use the example uh of architecture because I do a lot of that. Not just that. I've also done a lot of industrial and agroindustrial and even fashion photography and won awards for those quite curiously. But let's let's stick to architecture. Let's say there's a building and there's a person walking in front of the building that I couldn't get rid of. To make it really simple, I can select the area where that person is and go to generative fill and just say, you know, get rid of this guy or not even say anything. Just click go and boom, it goes.

Now, we're talking about like I remember many years ago I photographed an interior and I had some flowers in the K on the kitchen counter and the client said to me, "I don't like those flowers. I need you to take them out. " That took me at the time an hour or two to the background behind it because I didn't have a visual on that background the flowers were covering. I had to invent it. So, part of it I could recreate from other areas and other parts I had to invent. Mhm.

In one second or two seconds, Photoshop does that for you. Now, and I actually have to say that the more complex the situation is, the better the results seem to be.

Sometimes the simple things, sometimes the simple ones, it gets it kind of like, oh, no, that's not

I mean, other times it's all just bang, bang, but there's times when you give it a really complex thing that you're like, I'm sure I'm gonna have to go back in and work on this manually, and it just nails it.

Wow.

Now, the same way you can also add elements. Now, I could,

for example, they they show the example of a couch in an interior. It could be a couch in the exterior. I could say, "Place this couch on the sidewalk there. "

And not only does it automatically place it there, but it what the name of the tool, it harmonizes

the couch.

So, it looks like the the angle of the light, the the the, you know, the hardness of the shadow, the color, it blends it in. I actually haven't used this myself yet, but you know, I know it's doing that.

You you mentioned this thing about background f I actually tied it myself and I actually if you go to my LinkedIn profile you can see what I've done I um had an image which I liked for me professionally but it always had this background in it and I used it anyway what I did this is only a week or two ago I took that image and I said to ChatGPT can you fill the background and make it look like a professional portrait photo and as you say within seconds that image came back with the background as a clear fill there's nothing in the background now That image is probably 10 years old. So if you go there and have a look at it, you know, you can see the difference between me there and now.

But it's amazing.

It's amazingly quick and it solved a problem for me that I'd had with that image and how I present my profile. So

I saw on Instagram the other day they were giving out a prompt for, you know, how to turn any picture into a professionallook bio shot. Here's the prompt to use. You know, feed it your picture and use this prompt

and you'll get a professionallook studio. Boom. Again, there goes, you know, a selection of of photographers who are making a living from that,

right? And also, it's challenging Photoshop. I mean, Photoshop's done a pretty good job over, I guess, 20 more or more years of staying competitive even more challenges coming in, you know.

Yep, it it is. And uh yeah, I mean anyhow, nano banana I think has already been at least in Photoshop beta I think at least temporarily it's already included within the system when uh banana nano or nano banana or whatever it is. I haven't used it yet but I've seen it.

What is banana?

Oh I mean I listen guys I'm probably saying it wrong and everybody's cracking up but it's it was banana nano or nano banana or something. Um it came up I was I became aware of it a few months ago.

I think it was like Google's AI photo creation tool and it was just you know instant huge success and it was I think a turning point in you know the creation of visuals with AI and I remember there was a patch to use it within Photoshop that was being you know talked about on some YouTube channel. This is how you patch it in Photoshop. Well, Photoshop already integrated it at least temporarily into their into the Photoshop program themselves

if if I understand correctly. Not sure if that's on the beta

or on on the current version.

Cool. Well, that's another list some of these in the description for people to I know everybody's cracking up and saying, "Yeah, yayo pineapple, right?

He really nailed that, you know. " But

I think it's nano banana or something like that. You know, sometimes the fact that I've lived in Spain so long also that I have to admit, you know, there's occasionally major bloopers even in my English or

Well, let's talk about that for a second because we had another podcast guest last week, um, Deline, and she was talking about language and and she teaches language and how easy it is now using the current tools, including AI,

to learn a language.

You've been speaking Spanish for a long time. If are you finding it's AI helping you at all with language translation or you just way beyond that now?

So not so much with translation because I am way beyond that. I just for everyone to know I I came to Spain when I was six uh from the states. So I learned Spanish in school in Madrid and even though we moved back basically to California from the ages of 10 to 18 and I lost forgot all my Spanish and didn't use it. There weren't a lot of Spanish- speaking people and I wasn't really in in in their presence so much.

I came back to Spain with very bad Spanish and a strong American accent. But over 42 years I've been here since then. Of course, you know, I I basically have nearly impeccable fluent Spanish.

Although people can still be a little puzzled as to exactly what accent I have or or me blundering on on the genders, I still don't get the genders right because in English there's no gender to a microphone, but in Spanish it's either going to be a male or a female word, you know, the microphone. I I I'll I've never bothered to totally learn all of those. So people can still But here's an interesting I was just reading the other day is that

brains are wired differently in different countries depending on the language.

Germanic heard something about this too

have have their brains wired more on I think it was the left side because it's more like the way the words are structured and and added on to each other whereas Arabic speaking had more of a cross pattern between the two hemispheres because it was much more symbolic and visual and or you know it was really interesting and it was talking about how people who learned languages when they were very young were able to have that wired into their brain in a much deeper way than somebody who's trying to learn it as an adult

right I I think you have the significant advantage with language I believe because and I experienced this when I lived in Finland.

Um they all have multiple languages and they learned them very early and they would always say it was Sesame Street how they learned English but English was a common theme because it's only 5 million people in Finland. They had to learn Swedish, they would learn English, they would learn Finnish and then they would often pick up another language like German or even Russian. So it was quite common to meet someone with five languages. But they also had a fabulous command of language in general. They would have this way of saying something in so few words and be so precise. Um much better than just a general English speaker. And I think it's exactly what you're saying.

It's funny.

I have a few had circumstances where Spanish people tell me I speak better than they do. In fact, I had somebody tell me I was I I was kind of saying, "Look, I'm I'm I'm I'll I'll ne I'll never be totally American or totally Spanish. I'm a beautiful blend of of both cultures and and languages and and and everything. And I and I think that's wonderful. I'm very happy with that. She said, "You're you're more Spanish than I am. " And she was

a totally Spanish woman. And I said, "What do you mean? " And she says, "Well, you've said you've been in Spain 45 years in total. Uh I haven't been in Spain 45 years yet. " Well, she was obviously under the age of 45.

So that was kind of a nice way of looking at it. Was like, "Actually, yes, I am more Spanish than you. I've been here longer than you have. " Okay,

Wayne. So, let's we're going to have to start thinking about wrapping up, but is there anything on the AI side that you're coming across or where do you think AI is going? I mean, that what's your take on AI at the moment?

I'm I think I'm concerned. I think there are some like any tool there are amazing benefits and there's amazing opportunity for negative impact mostly to be applied by people who want to take advantage of those possibilities. Um,

so I think we're entering uncharted unknown waters now.

Not just speaking about AI in the visuals, which I've definitely, you know, expressed my concern about how that affects us as a society. Even myself, who I'm always thinking about these things, I find myself taking the news or images I see or something I see on Facebook for granted that it was a photograph. If I'm not stopping and pausing and thinking about it carefully,

I I might share it and assume that it was legit and then I'm always corrected by a friend of mine who's got his eye out on it who's always going Nat AIN NAT scam.

Um, so aside from being very concerned about that, I I really I'm I'm concerned about kind of the talking now a bit life and politics and things that perhaps we shouldn't be broaching, but I'm concerned about the polarization in the United States and in Spain.

Uh, I think it's a divide and conquer sort of thing. Keep the people fighting amongst themselves and, you know, we can continue to rule over and do what we want.

I'm not a paranoid conspiracist sort of guy, but you know, I like to be aware and I I I think that, you know, the middle class, we're returning to sort of some sort of feudal scenario where really there's a small percentage of rich who are getting richer or corporations that are getting bigger

and the average person who we had a very large middle class uh you know when I was growing up seems to be continually being pushed downwards and I'm just throw all that uncertainty in the political and the economic context, throw AI into that where basically companies are now going to start spending their available money on AI, you know, warehouses located somewhere that are going to be earning what

people were earning in wages and salaries, you know, to possibly a very large extent over the next years or decade.

M

uh you know plumbers and electricians and car mechanics are not necessarily going to be replaced

per se but blue collar workers or anybody who's working from the computer doing some sort of you know analysis or creation or re

these people are at risk as far as I understand it about losing their jobs

and so I I you know like I think everyone I definitely I'm not necessarily thinking Terminator end of the world AI is going to suddenly wake up and say humans are the danger you know push this button

but there are so many factors of uncertainty that even the people at the top from what I'm reading

and seeing on news and social media so I have no idea as to its relative

validity even the people are top are basically in a race to get there first to become the biggest consequences of what they're doing are but they cannot afford to stop

right well there's this term the I'm really concerned about yeah there's these magnificent seven which is the seven companies you know it's Facebook and Google and those that are all investing very heavily into AI in the data centers and to be on top of that pile um because they know that it's going to be a competitive race and there will be in the words of Bill Gates there will be winners and there will be losers and those that make the right decisions and make the right investments will win out I also heard a statistic

that that Magnificent 7 was 17% % of the uh the market share they had. I think it was on NASDAQ. Now they're up to 35%. So that plays very much into what you're saying. The wealth is being consolidated,

monopolized and global economy and

yeah into these very very hands of a very very few people. Worries me is, you know, are we going to get to the extent of there we're going to be on some sort of government stipend where we're all living in, you know, this is going into a futuristic sci-fi scenario, but it's it's becoming a possibility in in a midshortterm thing where, you know, we can't earn our own money.

They're going to have to pay us some money, which we will spend on the products these companies offer us because shops will close because it's better and wider selection and cheaper prices are easier to order online. You Is the scenario going to change to to that extreme extent? It almost seems inevitable.

And they ask one of these uh Magnificent Seven guys, you know, what what's your plan in case this scenario plays out? And he says, well, I bought a couple hundred acres of ranch and cattle and chicken out. They say, how does that help the rest of us?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I'm all right.

Another interesting thing about that, just to throw in, I I was reading something about Apple, which seemed to be having difficulty with its AI, but it was saying Apple may be the smartest of all of them. Apple doesn't need to produce and run the AI and throw all that money at it and risk. They just use it as a supplier. They team up and use it as a supplier. They have

the thing that's in millions and millions of people's hands and they have the, you know, the seamless uh universe within the Apple that everyone's working with. They don't actually necessarily have to create their own version of it.

Yeah.

All these people are throwing billions of dollars into this, you know, and is not actually necessarily proving to turn a profit yet

for them. You know, Apple may actually be outsmarting everybody sitting at the sidelines using whatever supplier works for them at the moment. And

well, they've been very successful in in the last I don't know, was it 40 years?

Yeah.

They just seem to make the right moves, don't they? So, let's wrap up with one final question to you, Wayne. AI hype or help?

It's absolutely help.

I don't think it's hype.

I'll rule that out right away. It's actually help. And let me actually use the came up when you asked about translating.

I didn't fully answer before. The first time I really used ChatGPT myself very recently was to send uh um a letter to the town hall um because I had uh gotten into a situation because we cut down a tree that was dying that was in risk of falling onto us and we asked for permissions.

It didn't arrive within the the time frame they said and we had to cut the tree down and then they find us basically to make it not exactly that but to make a short story you had to replace 10 trees and and so I I wrote the entire story of years of you know uh the seeds from our tree are falling onto the neighbor's plot and they're growing there's a forest there that's out of control you know and and you're asking me to plant more trees because I cut down the tree that died and you've never dealt with it I I yeah, I gave them a timeline.

I put all the info, all the evidence, the whole story,

and I just said to to ChatGPT, don't change what I said,

but I need you to put it into proper grammatical Spanish to present to an official organism.

Yes.

And what it gave me within a minute or less was like a lawyer's letter. The formatting, the grammar, the presentation took all my info and put it and the town hall went, "Uh, okay. Well, we'll reduce the fine and you only have to plant one tree. And I went, "No, no, no. You don't understand. " And I I went back over my points. And and then they answered, "Okay, we've sheld the case.

" And it was ChatGPT that I might have achieved that in my own wording, but it was ChatGPT that did that for me.

Yes.

And so it is not absolutely not hype.

And within photography, it's absolutely not hype. It is help.

Help.

The question is is it always going to be a positive influence or benefit or yes you know how much of it not is it how much of it will be negative and how can we avoid

yeah I think you've raised a very good point it's not as simple as hype and help there's this other latitude is it good or is it bad well that brings us to the end of our time together Wayne absolute pleasure there was so much more I wanted to dig into but we really don't have the time for that and maybe we can get you back on and we can dig into some more things

I was going to say let them forget A month or two later, I'll be happy to come back.

Well, you'd be welcome back anytime, Wayne.

Wonderful.

Well, thank you very much for for coming on board.

A true pleasure.

Really. Ciao, everyone.

Allan was a fabulous guest. Really enjoyed talking to him. He has such a wealth of knowledge around photography. I'd certainly like to have him back and we could dig deeper into that. What was interesting is we both had a history in uh photography going back over 40 years and we both were very familiar with our memories of using the old analog cameras and how that transitioned into digital and now with AI. Now what is happening in an AI in photography is pretty obvious to many of us. But we dug a little bit deeper into some of the tools that becoming available and ubiquitous to all of us.

Things that can change the background with a click of a button. Things that can brush and airbrush and AI can do a lot to change the uh content of the image even to the point of misdirecting what the truth was. And I think that was one of the key areas that we both resonated on. How do we find the truth using what has been traditionally a very safe media where that film media was was our source of truth. That is all now being challenged. Now Allan did answer the key question. Is AI hype or help? And he came down on the help side of things because he uses it to help in his business creating good photos, but he also talked about the other dimension, good or bad.

Is this really taking us into a world that we want to know? So, I hope you enjoyed all that. Now, if you want to know more about Skillion, please follow the links in the description. If you would like to be a guest on the podcast, please also apply through those links. I hope that helps and thanks for watching.