Chiusano Photography

I have noticed a quite obvious (to me, anyway) decline in the technical level of commercial photography images. It is not unusual to notice food advertisements in which the food looks awful, or executive portraits in which the face of the person is so badly lit that you can’t see the eyes clearly.

For those of us who made a living in commercial photography, it is no exaggeration to report that we wouldn’t have been paid if we supplied work on this level. Our clients expected, and demanded work at a high technical level, not what amounts to a snapshot.

This all brings up the question: how are standards established, and further, what causes standards to decline? Or perhaps, we might ask, if the client is pleased enough to pay us, regardless of its deficiencies, then the whole idea of “standards” is irrelevant; the market has spoken and that’s that.

In my career, commercial photography required what would now be considered a rather high level of technical skill. You had to learn about lighting, film exposure and processing, and not a little understanding of optics and camera operation. Clients understood that, and were careful about who they hired.

But once digital imaging took hold, and it was possible to see “results” instantly, it led inexorably to image quality being judged not by the photographer, per se, but by the judgment of an art director, or worse, by a sales person with no experience. In other words, your years of experience lost value, replaced by looking at a screen. Good enough could be, well, “good enough”.

Thus, the difficulty of doing photography meant that only people who worked at it for years or decades were able to produce work, and at the same time gained the trust of the people paying for the work. Once the difficulty disappeared, at least on a technical level, and an image available for viewing right away, the self-judgment of the professional no longer mattered as it once did.

Or put another way, when something is difficult, quality can be maintained; but when it gets too easy, quality inevitably declines. Such is the sorry state of commercial photography today, because it has gotten all too easy.

At a time when an iphone is capable of taking photographs of excellent quality, I have returned to using large wooden cameras and sheet film. So the question is: why do this? Why go the bother of hauling around a heavy camera that takes one picture at a time, is fiendishly slow to set up and is generally a pain in the neck to operate?

I used a Wisner view camera and 8x10-inch film for the photograph below, and I can say authoritatively that I could not have achieved the same result with any of the current crop of mirrorless small cameras, never mind an iphone.

When you are viewing the ground glass of a view camera, in this case an image eight inches by ten inches in size, it's almost as if you are viewing the final image itself. You can see fine details, and fine compositional mistakes, that would be impossible to view on the "TV" screen of a fancy DSLR. In addition, the ability to apply swings and tilts to the orientation of the lens and film back means that you can adjust planes of focus and perspective that can't be obtained othewise. You can adjust what is in focus and what is not to a degree impossible with a digital camera.

View camera photography is thus a gift of precision photography. It comes however, only after years of practice and technical skill-building. In today's shooting environment, that level of skill is seldom called for or appreciated; an iphone picture is good enough, sadly.

Smartphones have ruined fine photography.

There…I’ve said it.

It is a well-documented fact that the volume of photographs taken annually has jumped astronomically due to the ubiquity of smartphones. Everyone has one and everyone is pointing it here and there and pressing the red button that snaps a picture.

Trouble is, the quality of these pictures is marginal at best, and terrible most of the time. In this post I will offer my reasons why this is so.

In the old days of film photography, taking a picture required a certain level of skill, and a certain amount of money to pay for the film itself. The skill required, and the cost involved created a natural tendency for picture quality to be the metric to determine good from bad in a photograph. It was just not sensible to waste money on a picture that looked marginal, which drove the craft involved to a higher level and made valuable the efforts of a “professional” photographer.

Or put another way, if you make something too easy, the quality will go down because anyone will involve themselves, especially those with limited ability.

This is precisely what I am seeing with the flood of smartphone pictures that are everywhere.

The worse part of all this is not so much that bad pictures are everywhere, which is bad enough. What’s worse is that the proliferation has edged out any appreciation of fine imagery. Viewing standards have lowered, and people can’t tell good from bad.

In my own specialty, commercial and advertising, the photographs I now see in food menus and packaging would not be accepted for payment when I had my studio. A fair proportion of today’s food photography is just plain ugly or makes the food appear unappetizing. This is what I mean by lowered standards.

Not everyone agrees that there is any point in talking about quality standards. In this view, if enough people like it, who cares what it looks like.

But I for one believe that photography should be beautiful, and hard to achieve, the result of years of study, mistakes, and effort. It can’t be the random accident of waving a smartphone around and hoping for the best.

It is now obvious to me that AI is going to make some drastic changes to the business of commercial and portrait photography. In this post I am going to address some of these changes.

In the case of commercial and advertising photography, which was my business for thirty years, it is with great regret that I am predicting the end of that business in a few years. Put in simple terms, AI is going to cripple the practice of product photography, the mainstay of a commercial studio, and let me explain why.

Let’s say you have a food client that sells a line of fruit drinks, in different flavors. As a product photographer, you could bill out on a regular basis the various product shots of the various labels, bottle sizes and backgrounds. I did this routinely in my studio using 4x5 sheet film and, later, digital cameras, and could charge for a day or two at my day rate. A couple of these jobs in a month could often cover my overhead, despite having a large studio with high rent and other expenses.

Or let’s say your client is a manufacturer of running clothing, and you shoot their catalog photographs from year to year. You would have an ongoing stream of shoots as styles changed, or even a single style in different colors, and you would hire models to make changes through the course of a few days, and the billings would be considerable, involving expenses for the models, assistants and stylists and perhaps makeup artists.

Now let’s enter AI. For your beverage client, it will not make sense any longer to shoot a string of similar photographs, say for example bottles with different labels, or even different sizes. Instead you’ll deliver a single photograph of a “blank” bottle, and the client’s AI software will blend in various labels, backgrounds and so forth, all in a few seconds. A shoot that might be a day or two will be reduced to a single shot that might take you an hour or two at most. I can even envision that single shot going away altogether, as the AI software will hold an inventory of various bottle sizes and formats, at which point the need for any studio time will go away entirely, and there goes your income stream.

For that clothing client, the same logic prevails. The AI software will generate virtual models, and then put them in the clothing line with all manner of colors and styles, all generated within the innards of a computer in a few seconds, and there goes another income stream for your studio.

Just a couple of years ago I would have dismissed this level of pessimism about the business of commercial and advertising photography. But today, I am not so sure. AI-generated images now look absolutely real. Realistically, vast chunks of work are going to disappear as AI solutions take their place. Will it make sense to maintain a commercial studio? Perhaps so, but in what shape or form? This will be a topic for a future commentary.

Here is another black and white landscape. I used a 4x5 Linhof view camera and Ilford Delta 100 film, processed normally. I darkened the blue sky slightly by adding an orange filter over the lens. The photograph is evenly split between very high and very low tonal values.