Noir squirrels and creating content
An essay about photography from a writer's perspective
Over the past several weekends, I spent—no, I invested—several early morning hours driving to various locations downtown and in the surrounding rural areas, hunting images.
I crept through sketchy alleys armed with my current weapon of choice, a Pentax 17 film camera, fully loaded with Illford HP5+ 400 ASA monochrome film and a yellow #8 filter. For my backup piece, I had a Polaroid Now+ and two cartridges of Polaroid I-type monochrome instant film.
I also scoped out some landscapes that one might, I dunno, dispose of certain articles that one wouldn’t want discovered for a long time.
Why weekends? I work full-time during the week for my career. That’s how I support my writing. I do bring a camera to work but I generally am focused on work while in the office and I don’t get many opportunities to walk around the street or stare out a window.
Why film? I’m not a hipster. I’m simply old. I grew up using film. I was trained on film. I understand film. And what the heck, I actually like film in all its finicky, fragile, flakey, low-dynamic range fickleness.
Why do this? For content.
What’s the problem? The problem is that MFS is all about the written word and not about images, video, or podcasting.
Yet, there I was, taking photos.
Because in the 21st century, you can’t simply write. Your fellow writers online are posting photos, videos, and podcasting. Your readers have grown up consuming multimedia content. Your platform practically demands that you attach images to each article.
Even if your readers say that they don’t need images, the data shows that posts with images, even bad images, get more clicks than posts that have bare words.
If you’ve been following/subscribing to MFS for a while, you know that I use AI-generated images for covers and illustrations. (I started MFS roughly at the same time generative AI really took off.) In the beginning, it was amazing. But eventually people freaked out.
Now there’s a backlash toward AI-generated images.
I get it. Most AI images are painfully, cringe-fully, obviously made by AI. They’re a huge turnoff. The models are trained on human-generated images, often without permission of the artists, and that’s a huge problem.
And honestly, I’m not a huge fan of AI generated images. I only use them out of practical need. However, to get a usable image—specifically, an image that I like—it takes a lot of work. Sometimes it takes a few days of going back and forth and tweaking an image to get it to the point where it doesn’t completely look like AI garbage. I’ve had to learn about prompting for image generation. I often will use a human-generated image as a base image, too, and alter it in subtle ways to make the image relevant.
Compared to AI images, with human-generated images is also extremely time-consuming. You have to go out and look for locations, deal with weather, lighting, people who really don’t want their picture taken, etc. Then (if you’re using film) you have to develop or have it developed. Then you have to use an image editor to tweak the final result.
In any event, the moral and legal problems presented by AI-generated images are too great right now. Going forward, for MFS, I’m making a deliberate choice to limit the use of AI-generated images to those situations in which a human-generated image will be too difficult to acquire.
Human-generated images, however, present a legal problem around sharing and re-use. So, I’ll be relying as much as possible on my own work.
Which means I’m back out on the street, stockpiling images for stories that I hope to have the time to write someday.
When, you know, I’m not out taking pictures.
At least the weather is nicer now.
All images copyright by the author. Please do not re-use without permission.
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