Blinded by the Flash: The Trials of Dating a Photography Addict

Hey everyone! It’s me again, Charlotte York.

I’m finally at peace with my love life. I’d like for everyone to meet Phil M. Flash. He’s picture-perfect if I do say so myself! A little bit about him: he’s 6’4, has brown hair, eyes that sparkle like lenses, and guys, guess what! He’s a photographer! He loves taking pictures and he really has an eye for it.

At the beginning of our relationship, I learned a lot about photos, cameras and lighting. He was super passionate about sharing all his knowledge with me, and to be honest my Instagram has never looked better. One of the first things he taught me was the difference between lossless and lossy images. Weird names, I know, but the way he explained it made me see the clear difference between the two.

He said Lossless images have the highest quality. Not only do they begin as beautiful high resolution, perfectly clear and sharp, but even as you share them, they retain their quality. Phil works mostly with Lossless images. He has a big expensive camera that he always brings with him to capture every moment. Sometimes after dinner parties, everyone will ask me for the pictures, but I can’t share them right away because he’s still downloading them, which takes HOURS!

On the other hand, Lossy photos are the ones he hates the most. He can’t stand that they are low resolution and low quality. He was a little disappointed in me when we first started dating, because I would mostly use lossy photos, unknowingly of course. When I would send him photos through Instagram I could feel his frustrations through the screen. He would wait and wait for the image to load, hoping it would update to be better quality, but unfortunately, the more Lossy photos are shared the more quality they lose and the worse they look.

The only other thing that gets him riled up as much as Lossy photos are AI images.

One day I was minding my own business playing around with some AI to create photos of my favourite book characters only for Phil to sneak up behind me. Completely appalled that I would be using AI to create photographs. He made me read Rob Horning’s article on “What Is Realism in the Age of AI?” He specifically wanted me to look into what a real photo meant.

Now from my understanding everyone’s definition of a “real photo” is different. Some believe that the only real pictures are the ones developed with chemicals on paper. Therefore, anything “on Meta’s platforms are made of digital code” and do not exist as true photographs, they are just ones and zeros that have been aligned in a certain way to create pixels that then become the image. In terms of AI, the line becomes blurry when people think of how much of the image has or hasn’t been touched by AI. Is it fully created by this artificial mind/camera? Was it only edited using AI? It brings the question of how much people can recognize what is real in a picture and what has been edited by the photographer, or even AI. For example, I now can tell when the clothes on a website have been edited by “someone”. The garment may be one colour but AI has been able to help the company change the colour of the item to show consumers the other options. Is this saving the company money? Yes. But is it tricking the consumers? That’s up for debate.

Sometimes I ask myself: Is it too much? If he always brings his camera everywhere then what is a special moment? Are all of them special? Why dictate which one is and which one isn’t by when he brings out his camera vs. when he puts it away? I think that in those most important moments when he brings the camera to his face is when I lose him. He views me as a subject in a lens, rather than his girlfriend he’s experiencing life with.