"I’ll just AI it." It has become a bit of a running joke on my photography sets at Bennett Winch, and, not being a writer by trade, the lure of getting ChatGPT to create this article was undeniably strong – but I decided that wouldn’t be in the spirit of what I wanted to say.

My first stance on AI was ‘better the devil you know’. As with all things tech, if you resist, you inevitably end up being left behind. An ‘unsupported document’. Obsolete.

The programs I use for editing have been integrating AI as a means of streamlining your workflow. They can now automatically correct exposure, adjust white balance, smooth skin, and cull any out-of-focus shots. It offers to save you time on tedious tasks – but it’s not for me; I don’t find these tasks tedious. The reward is sitting down at the end of a shoot with the crew, and a cold beer, and seeing what we got. We call it a ‘crunch’ session – selecting the best images, applying grades, finding the ‘belters’. The edit is part of the craft. I enjoy spending far too long applying different grades, shifting between the smallest difference in brightness to perfect the image – fully aware that this minute level of variation cannot be detected by the human eye. It’s the same excitement I’d get developing films at college; the process of spooling the film, mixing the chemicals, agitating, drying.

The more daunting prospect, beyond simply streamlining menial editing tasks, is AI’s capacity for total image generation. Now the camera itself is under threat. An image of a product can simply be captured on a smartphone and dropped into any scenario or landscape. This hands-off approach to image creation lacks a connection to the subject, to reality. AI lacks emotion and that, I believe, is the one reason it’s not coming for my job.

The pace and fidelity of AI in photography has prompted an interesting response at the Bennett Winch studio and the images we create – what we are calling the rise of the ‘super-analogue’. A desire to keep things as real as possible. For that, we thank the robots. It was sparked by some recent photoshoots, the first being a still life scene in our studio.

We had gone to great lengths sourcing specific pieces of vintage furniture and had even designed and built our own props. After spending hours composing, lighting and shooting the scene, I went about my retouching as normal. But the resulting image was deemed by the team to look “too good”. The solution was to ‘de-touch’ it – an unconventional new post-processing technique of preserving all evidence of human effort, adding the natural creases back into the bag, restoring the vintage chest of drawers to its chipped and stained form.

The second catalyst for our new analogue movement was a shoot on location in the wilds of Scotland. The team had ventured to the least accessible places to capture images amid ancient Viking lands and rock formations that date back millions of years, only to become concerned that people would think the images were fake. The natural landscape just looked too awesome. It would, of course, been far easier to have faked it. No logistical nightmares, no dramas, no Good Adventure at all. As the crew stood in a complete whiteout on top of a stormy Hebridean mountain, the gleaming AI version was just a click away. But where’s the fun in that? The choice is simple: stand in front of the mountain and take the shot, or stay indoors and click the ‘generate’ button. I know which camp I’m in.

Anyone who has worked with me knows I’m not one for speeding up. In my view photography doesn’t need to. One of my best purchases during the past 10 years was a manual focus 1970s Olympus 35 SP. A true object of soul and purpose. Shooting on film forces you to give more thought to the subject, to take a moment, to frame the shot. To slow down.

We are now exploring using film alongside digital for our shoots in the future, so not only will the subject be authentic, but the image will be completely true to that. The result of mechanisms and chemicals.

Our desire to pursue the most authentic form of photography amid a sea of AI-generated content is not a passive rejection of technology, more an active pursuit of reality. Of pushing human creativity.

My advice is don’t fear the analogue – it’s a brave new world.