The revival of an old project and an ethical question

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I've been flirting with the idea of pet photography for many years but I never got into this with consistency. One of my last projects before I close my studio, more than ten years ago, was an experimentation on this very topic. My life though took a different turn shortly after and I quit, not only the project but photography altogether. And although I never became a pet photographer, I am very grateful for all the beautiful pictures of my dog that I have, now that he is no longer with us. I have shown you some of those pictures a couple of months ago in this post as I do every year on the date he left us.

But all that was in the past. Now that I pick up the thread of my photographic journey once more, I remembered the old project and took a few shots of the very black and very much alive successor of my original model!

Apart from the change of model, there is one more small difference, I don't really have a photographic studio anymore :)

There is a space that I share with @traisto and her loom but it is pretty much full with all the crafting activities that we have there. But Marcos (the dog) is very cooperative and we managed to take a few shots next to the door. You can even see the entrance stairs in the picture below!

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I am pretty happy with that attempt, especially the first picture. It's hard to tell that it wasn't taken in a proper studio. But then again faking a studio is quite easy for me, as long as I have a bright window and a background. Getting outdoors was more tricky. A lot more parameters to control and a lot more things that could go wrong. The light might be too flat, the background might be too bright, the dog gets easily distracted etc etc. But if everything goes well, you could end up with much more interesting pictures than indoors.

The following picks are from the walk I told you about yesterday, where I ended up shooting more cats than Marcos himself. The results are far from perfect but after the editing, quite descent.

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Editing in black and white wasn't something I had in mind from the beginning but after a lot (and I mean A LOT) of versions, I tried this edit at the first picture and I loved it. And then I reedited all the others in the same style resulting to a monochrome post and my entry for the #monomad challenge!

But for the last two I think I prefer the colour version instead.

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Before I go, there is something more I want to share with fellow photographers.

Let me first say that I am not a big fun of AI. I am old fashioned and usually sceptical about innovations, especially when I think poorly of the corporations introducing them. Nevertheless I use the adobe products and apparently they decided to bring AI in their users life, from the back door.

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I am referring of course to the new tools in Photoshop like denoise, generative fill and lens blur. All three are doing, in a more easy and more efficient way, things that could be done with older tools too. Yet I used all three of them in the pictures of this post. To reduce noice to the ones that were taken with very high iso, to blur a background that was a bit distracting or to remove the leash and expand the background. I am including a few screenshots from the Lightroom with the original picture and the final version.

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And this question popped up in my mind:

Is using AI powered tools in photoshop ethical?

Google answered that:

While most ethical questions surrounding the use of AI in photography centre around the creation of entire images, most of the AI-powered tools available in the best photo editing software are pretty much benign when it comes to the question of ethics and authenticity.

And Adobe this:

By taking a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to AI ethics, Adobe is committed to ensuring this technology is developed responsibly and respects our customers and our communities.

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In those pictures, I don't think that I exceeded any ethical line but I wonder, as those tools are getting more and more efficient and as many more will undoubtedly come, won't be a point that the creative process of editing would be undermined by the tools themselves, at the expense of the human creators?

I would love to hear your thoughts on that in the comments!

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_{The camera that I used is a Canon EOS 6D mark II with an EF 100mm f2.8L macro lens attached.}

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All the pictures and the words are mine.

Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.

Commenting, upvoting and rebloging are highly appreciated!