Chris Gale is a photographer residing in Washington DC who feels incredibly embarrassed to refer to himself in the third person so I will stop doing so from this point forward. I struggle with about statements or artist bios for all of the reasons that most people struggle with them, as well as a few that are probably unique to me and yet…
Saying that I like to make photographs to freeze moments or chronicle the present of the human experience are not lies, but also not really the truth. Photography is a permeable barrier between myself and a world I don’t feel home; a suit coat that’s always a little too tight in a fabric that offends my skin. Camera as both totem and binky; an excuse for a conversation, a reason for existing in a world that increasingly requires justification. I also just love the sound of the shutter but you can’t really just say that.
I am fascinated by people, both just as someone going through life but also as a photographer. I have never liked any photograph that didn't have a person in it. No landscape of a beautiful national park, nothing in space.
Statement on AI
This isn't like an existential statement about the concept of AI or what other people are doing (although I certainly have opinions about that) but as it relates to AI and my usage of tools as a photographer I want to document what I am comfortable with and what I'm not.
Adobe Camera RAW - I use Adobe Camera RAW to process my camera files and the noise reduction that they introduced and were assuredly excited to label as AI works really well for noisier images. I will also use the healing brush to clean up spots and sometimes the AI version works well and other times you have to do it the other way. Also the AI masking in general works very well and I find useful. I don't do AI content-aware fill of like the AI background replacements just because my work is mostly through an editorial lens where I want to reflect the actual scene but if I was doing a commercial shoot I think that stuff is fine. I don't use any of those AI-editing applications like Evoto but that's just because I'm not having to process like 600 shots from a wedding and have them all have be retouched. I'm also not really interested in outsourcing a part of the process that I really enjoy; which is a sentiment I think is shared across a lot of people interacting with AI.
PicTime - I use PicTime to host galleries because I finally reached the point where emailing people a OneDrive link and then troubleshooting why the sharing permissions weren't working for everyone was more of a hassle than paying for a service like PicTime. They have a feature where they use AI to scan your photos that you upload where I guess the idea is that if you are a guest at a wedding and someone sends you the link to the gallery you can click on a picture of your face and it'll show you all the photos of you at the wedding. That's a very cool feature for that particular use-case but I disable that feature on every gallery I create on the site because I am absolutely not comfortable with the idea of people who happened to be at a place I was taking pictures at having their faces scanned and stored in a cloud service without their awareness or consent. PicTime does a good job of calling attention to this setting when you make a new gallery though.