"You have to create a look that’s your own," reveals photographer and educator Scott Kelby

One of my talks is called ‘The Stuff Other Photographers Won’t Tell You’. The kind of things that photographers will talk about with each other at the bar after a shoot but they won’t talk about publicly or to a large group of photographers. I talk about those things in a plain and straight-to-the-point way and it opens a lot of people’s eyes. I’ve been fortunate enough to do a similar talk and people would come up afterwards and say, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me these things before?’ It’s because they’re hard to talk about, but they’re an important part of photography. And if you’re not an apprentice, you might never learn these things. So I try to be honest and tell people things that will move them forward in their photography without having to do it the hard way.

That’s a good question. I love them both in different ways but I guess if I had to pick one, there is something special about looking out into an audience and seeing a collective light bulb come on. It is hard to put into words. The feeling that you get when you’re connecting to an audience and the energy that they give you is just phenomenal and I love it.

But on the other side, there’s something special about getting out to a location early in the morning. Maybe you’re setting up to shoot the Eiffel Tower before the sun rises – there’s no one there because tourists don’t like to get up at 5:45am and you’re all by yourself in this amazing place that, an hour from now, will be crowded with 500 people. But right now, it’s just you and that moment. It’s a tough call but I love both experiences in different ways.

The secret is that you have to create a look that’s your own. One where someone can look at images from 10 different photographers and go, ‘Oh, that’s theirs, I can tell their style or I know their look’. Part of this may come from the way you take the shot. It may come from how you frame it, which lenses you choose, composition styles, how you choose to post-process your photos or, more likely, a combination of all. I shoot this particular style in this way, I use this particular lens and then I post-process it in a consistent style.

And that’s really the key. You have to have a repeatable, consistent style. You can’t be looking like one photographer one day and a different photographer on another – what if somebody hires you and they’re expecting that photographer to show up? You need a consistent style to be a success. 

What I will be teaching about AI at the show, because Adobe also has me speaking on their stage, is called ‘How to Use AI and Still Sleep at Night’. If you use AI ethically and you use it as most photographers would probably want to use it, I think it can be wonderful and will do everything you just said it would – speed up boring production tasks, fix bad compositions and remove distracting things that ruin shots. There are lots of great things it can do.

However, one thing that I don’t think is good for photography is adding things to images. I don’t add birds flying into the scene that weren’t there. I don’t add planes flying between buildings or put a giraffe in the photo. If we see it as a production tool to help streamline things we already do, that’s great. We could already remove things and take distracting things away, so that’s not new, AI just does it faster. If we use it right, AI can be a wonderful freeing tool that gives us more time behind the camera and less time editing. Also, like any tool, you can abuse it and use it to create things your camera never captured.

I want to use AI as a tool that is going to speed up the things I could already do, not add things. If you want to create art from scratch using AI, that’s fine – just let everyone know it’s an illustration. There’s nothing wrong with using AI to create images, but don’t try to fool people into thinking it’s a photograph. Don’t add elements and say it’s an image you took – it’s half-photograph and half-AI-illustration. Just disclaim everything, and most folks will be OK with it. What I’ll be teaching is trying to be ethical and smart and still sleep at night because we’re not creating things we couldn’t create. We’re using AI to make our lives better – that’s my AI answer.