Why I Don't Edit My Own Photos Anymore

Someone pointed this out to me recently and I realized it was worth addressing directly.

I run an agency that uses AI image generation extensively for clients. We generate lifestyle photography, product visuals, architectural renders. We use tools that produce images that didn't exist in front of a camera. We're good at it, we do it well, and the results speak for themselves.

My personal photography workflow: Ricoh GR III. JPEG. Straight out of camera. No Lightroom. No AI. No editing at all. The photo comes out of the camera and goes to my phone, and that's it.

People who know both sides of my work find this inconsistent. I don't think it is.

Two different things

Photography for clients and photography for myself are not the same activity. Not in goals, not in process, not in what counts as a good outcome.

For clients, the goal is communication. A visual that conveys a specific message to a specific audience, in a specific context. The image is a tool: it serves a purpose beyond itself. Whether that image was captured by a camera or generated by a model is irrelevant as long as it does its job. The clients who hire us to produce their visual content don't care how the image was made. They care whether it moves their audience.

For myself, photography is something else entirely. It's a practice: a way of seeing, of being present, of capturing a moment before it's gone. The process matters as much as the result. The act of looking for something worth shooting, of deciding when to press the shutter, of accepting what came out. That's the point. Not the output file.

If I started using AI to generate my personal photos, I'd be replacing the thing I actually value with its simulacrum. What I want is the practice. The tool is secondary.

Why I stopped editing entirely

For years I shot RAW. I spent hours in Lightroom: adjusting exposure, color grading, retouching. I got decent at it. The photos came out the way I wanted them.

Then I discovered color recipes and the GR III's in-camera processing, and I stopped. Not because the editing was bad; I'd gotten good at it. But because the editing was a filter between me and the moment. The photo I published had been shaped by the mood I was in when I sat down at my computer, not the mood I was in when I pressed the shutter.

JPEG, straight out of camera, with a preset that I've tuned to match what I want: this gives me the photo I actually took. Honest about the light, the moment, the decision. If it's slightly underexposed or the shadows are a bit heavy, that's what it was. That's the light. That's the moment.

I share these photos with family, on my site, to keep a personal archive. None of it needs to be perfect. It just needs to be real.

The irony I've made peace with

There is an irony here that I've thought about.

I help clients produce images that look more real than reality: generated visuals of apartments that don't exist yet, lifestyle photography without people who were never there. And I personally seek out authenticity with such conviction that I won't even crop a frame.

But I think the irony resolves when you understand what each activity is for.

The client visuals are communication tools. They're supposed to evoke a feeling, tell a story, sell a vision. The standard for success is whether they work: whether they make the audience feel something that leads to an action. A generated visual of an apartment that makes a buyer imagine themselves living there has done exactly what it was supposed to do.

My personal photos are memory. They're supposed to capture what was actually there. A photo of my kids at the beach that represents how the beach actually looked (not how I could have made it look with thirty minutes in Lightroom) is a more honest record of that afternoon. And in twenty years, that's what I'll want.

The standard for success is different. And so the tool should be different.

What AI changed about photography that I actually care about

The thing AI genuinely changed (and that I find genuinely interesting) is not the generation. It's the conversation around photography itself.

Because AI can now produce images that are indistinguishable from photographs, we've been forced to articulate why the real photograph matters. Not technically: we all know a camera captures light and a model generates pixels. But meaningfully. What does it mean that a moment was actually there?

The answer I've landed on: the photograph is evidence. It proves that a light, at a specific angle, fell on a specific face, on a specific afternoon, that is now gone. No generated image can be evidence of anything. It can be beautiful. It can be compelling. It can make you feel something real. But it can't be proof that something happened.

That's what I'm collecting with the GR III. Not beautiful images; I'll leave that to better photographers. Evidence that these days existed. That my kids looked like this. That Casablanca looked like this at this particular hour.

No AI prompt changes that. And that's exactly why I don't want it to.