Well it has been a while since I last posted a blog entry (too long).
Clarity, so what do I mean by this? Basically I’ve decided that Portraiture has to go from my photographic practice. What I mean by “go” is that I will no longer be actively looking for opportunities in that photographic genre. There are several reasons for this but I will only go into the main one’s.
1). Lack of opportunities - Since COVID commercial opportunities in this area have reduced considerably, unless you have your own studio or access to a studio it is now quite difficult to get a foothold not to mention with the advances in editing software means you can buy & download licenced images that can be manipulated far more extensively than ever before.
2). A.I. - This is going to revolutionise the industry in many ways the biggest of which I think will be the need for models & photographers. I mean who needs a model & photographer when you can type in some keywords into an AI image generator and “presto!” you have what you want for a fraction of the price. I can see commercial & fine art portrait photography being dramatically reduced by the use of AI as well as the product photography market (the latter through automation combined with AI).
Going forward
So what does this all mean going forward? Well I’ve decided that I will concentrate on my documentary photography & YouTube channel.
At the moment I have been concentrating on a new project called “Retrospective” which is about going back through my photographic archive from the last 12 or so years and re-editing RAW files but with the added challenge that all edits have to be in monochrome only. The aim of this project is to take a fresh perspective on my work and by having the monochrome only limitation to bring a different way of looking & thinking to that past work. I will post some images I have edited so far on here soon.