Self-Expression Over Quality

AI has made me rethink nature photography.

Eight years ago, I dis­covered nature pho­to­graphy as a hobby. Smartphone cam­er­as had been improv­ing rap­idly for quite some time, but for whatever reas­on, I developed a pref­er­ence for set­ting my expos­ures manu­ally and extract­ing flat, inform­a­tion-rich raw files that invited less destruct­ive post-editing.

Yes, my pho­tos were typ­ic­ally bet­ter than most smart­phone pho­tos plastered all over social media.

But “bet­ter” is a com­plic­ated concept — it turns out.

“Better” was the jus­ti­fic­a­tion I used to over­come my ego and jus­ti­fy my indul­gent social media pres­ence. I felt that it was okay to pub­lish my nature pho­to­graphs and, by doing so, ask people to con­sume my con­tent in com­pet­i­tion with so much else.

Today, “bet­ter” is no longer a worth­while consideration.

At this very moment, AI eas­ily out­per­forms my nature pho­to­graphy. And wherever photoreal­ist­ic image gen­er­a­tion stands today, it’s still the worst it’ll ever be. And to be hon­est, my cre­at­ive attempts as a hob­by­ist were ama­teur­ish anyway.

Truth to be told, my pas­sion for the hobby was already dying. Powerful AI tools inside my RAW edit­ing soft­ware were mak­ing it pos­sible to manip­u­late real images in pro­found ways.

Clutter in the back­ground? A bor­ing cloud cover? 

With a click of a but­ton, I could give my pho­tos a strik­ing set of dra­mat­ic clouds, adding depth and drama to my shot. Or I could remove any dis­turb­ing details with ease.

What am I doing here? On the one hand, I should do what I can to present a photo that closely matches my inten­ded vis­ion; I don’t want to waste any­one’s time with mediocre con­tent. There’s enough of that, surely.

On the oth­er hand, in what way does a photoreal­ist­ic fantasy con­trib­ute any­thing of sub­stance to the world? Sure, the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief offers a wel­come escape into the world of fic­tion, but what has that got to do with me throw­ing a cam­era over my shoulder and going out for a walk in the woods?

So, I don’t feel the need to take my cam­era out on adven­tures any­more. I can exper­i­ence the beauty of nature without doc­u­ment­ing any­thing. Nevertheless, I sure do miss my pas­sion for nature photography.

Should I find a way to recap­ture my lost passion?

Or should I move on and find oth­er, per­haps more AI-safe, pas­times to be pas­sion­ate about?

Sure, the harsh truth is that I must rene­go­ti­ate whatever I believed to be true and reas­sess. I must tear everything down and rebuild my entire think­ing around nature pho­to­graphy from the ground up. But I’m begin­ning to think that hard resets of this kind are fast becom­ing exist­en­tial necessities.

Because, hon­estly, noth­ing is AI-safe.

The way I need to rethink nature pho­to­graphy, both for myself and as a means of cre­at­ing online exper­i­ences for oth­ers, is the way we all must rethink almost everything.

As an ama­teur and a hob­by­ist, when I share a nature photo, I must come to terms with the fact that I’m not shar­ing a nature photo.

I’m shar­ing a part of myself.

Because nature pho­tos are eas­ily gen­er­ated and abund­ant. The only reas­on for any­one to take an interest is to con­nect with me, a human being, and share some­thing about what it means to be human, at some level or another.

My nature photo is noth­ing more than a medi­um for this rela­tion­ship — no mat­ter how fleet­ing that con­nec­tion may be. Even if the pub­lished photo turned out quite nicely and I’m proud to show it off on social media or wherever, its under­ly­ing pur­pose is to foster human connection.

So, what makes my nature pho­tos worth oth­er people’s time and atten­tion? It’s not the pho­to’s object­ive qual­ity (and it prob­ably nev­er was). No, it’s about wheth­er the photo says any­thing about the human per­spect­ive as I exper­i­ence it, or if it’s just anoth­er gen­er­ic nature photo on social media.

Self-expres­sion.

This mind­shift changes nature pho­to­graphy for me. If I want to con­tin­ue tak­ing beau­ti­ful nature pho­tos and shar­ing them on social media with pur­pose and pas­sion, I must not seek strik­ing, qual­ity scenes to share; I must seek to relate the exper­i­ence the scene evokes in me.

If I can teach myself how to express my unique­ness — or same­ness! — while using nature pho­tos as the medi­um of such mes­sages, the object­ive qual­ity of my pho­to­graphy becomes only one of many con­sid­er­a­tions of less­er importance.

And as the pho­to­graph­ic qual­ity becomes a sec­ond­ary pri­or­ity, so does the use of AI to enhance it.

As fate would have it, this is exactly how the top 1% in any cre­at­ive field already oper­ates. They’ve mastered a spe­cif­ic craft not to pro­duce high-qual­ity work, but to express them­selves through their chosen art form.