http://www.chiusanodigital.com/

Chiusano Photography, 39 Glidden Street, Beverly, MA (2026)

05/29/2026

I have noticed a quite obvious (to me, anyway) decline in the technical level of commercial photography images. It is not unusual to notice food advertisements in which the food looks awful, or executive portraits in which the face of the person is so badly lit that you can’t see the eyes clearly.

For those of us who made a living in commercial photography, it is no exaggeration to report that we wouldn’t have been paid if we supplied work on this level. Our clients expected, and demanded work at a high technical level, not what amounts to a snapshot.

This all brings up the question: how are standards established, and further, what causes standards to decline? Or perhaps, we might ask, if the client is pleased enough to pay us, regardless of its deficiencies, then the whole idea of “standards” is irrelevant; the market has spoken and that’s that.

In my career, commercial photography required what would now be considered a rather high level of technical skill. You had to learn about lighting, film exposure and processing, and not a little understanding of optics and camera operation. Clients understood that, and were careful about who they hired.

But once digital imaging took hold, and it was possible to see “results” instantly, it led inexorably to image quality being judged not by the photographer, per se, but by the judgment of an art director, or worse, by a sales person with no experience. In other words, your years of experience lost value, replaced by looking at a screen. Good enough could be, well, “good enough”.

Thus, the difficulty of doing photography meant that only people who worked at it for years or decades were able to produce work, and at the same time gained the trust of the people paying for the work. Once the difficulty disappeared, at least on a technical level, and an image available for viewing right away, the self-judgment of the professional no longer mattered as it once did.

Or put another way, when something is difficult, quality can be maintained; but when it gets too easy, quality inevitably declines. Such is the sorry state of commercial photography today, because it has gotten all too easy.

04/27/2026

At a time when an iphone is capable of taking photographs of excellent quality, I have returned to using large wooden cameras and sheet film. So the question is: why do this? Why go the bother of hauling around a heavy camera that takes one picture at a time, is fiendishly slow to set up and is generally a pain in the neck to operate?

I used a Wisner view camera and 8x10-inch film for the photograph below, and I can say authoritatively that I could not have achieved the same result with any of the current crop of mirrorless small cameras, never mind an iphone.

When you are viewing the ground glass of a view camera, in this case an image eight inches by ten inches in size, it's almost as if you are viewing the final image itself. You can see fine details, and fine compositional mistakes, that would be impossible to view on the "TV" screen of a fancy DSLR. In addition, the ability to apply swings and tilts to the orientation of the lens and film back means that you can adjust planes of focus and perspective that can't be obtained othewise. You can adjust what is in focus and what is not to a degree impossible with a digital camera.

View camera photography is thus a gift of precision photography. It comes however, only after years of practice and technical skill-building. In today's shooting environment, that level of skill is seldom called for or appreciated; an iphone picture is good enough, sadly.

03/23/2026

Smartphones have ruined fine photography.

There…I’ve said it.

It is a well-documented fact that the volume of photographs taken annually has jumped astronomically due to the ubiquity of smartphones. Everyone has one and everyone is pointing it here and there and pressing the red button that snaps a picture.

Trouble is, the quality of these pictures is marginal at best, and terrible most of the time. In this post I will offer my reasons why this is so.

In the old days of film photography, taking a picture required a certain level of skill, and a certain amount of money to pay for the film itself. The skill required, and the cost involved created a natural tendency for picture quality to be the metric to determine good from bad in a photograph. It was just not sensible to waste money on a picture that looked marginal, which drove the craft involved to a higher level and made valuable the efforts of a “professional” photographer.

Or put another way, if you make something too easy, the quality will go down because anyone will involve themselves, especially those with limited ability.

This is precisely what I am seeing with the flood of smartphone pictures that are everywhere.

The worse part of all this is not so much that bad pictures are everywhere, which is bad enough. What’s worse is that the proliferation has edged out any appreciation of fine imagery. Viewing standards have lowered, and people can’t tell good from bad.

In my own specialty, commercial and advertising, the photographs I now see in food menus and packaging would not be accepted for payment when I had my studio. A fair proportion of today’s food photography is just plain ugly or makes the food appear unappetizing. This is what I mean by lowered standards.

Not everyone agrees that there is any point in talking about quality standards. In this view, if enough people like it, who cares what it looks like.

But I for one believe that photography should be beautiful, and hard to achieve, the result of years of study, mistakes, and effort. It can’t be the random accident of waving a smartphone around and hoping for the best.

03/14/2026

It is now obvious to me that AI is going to make some drastic changes to the business of commercial and portrait photography. In this post I am going to address some of these changes.

In the case of commercial and advertising photography, which was my business for thirty years, it is with great regret that I am predicting the end of that business in a few years. Put in simple terms, AI is going to cripple the practice of product photography, the mainstay of a commercial studio, and let me explain why.

Let’s say you have a food client that sells a line of fruit drinks, in different flavors. As a product photographer, you could bill out on a regular basis the various product shots of the various labels, bottle sizes and backgrounds. I did this routinely in my studio using 4x5 sheet film and, later, digital cameras, and could charge for a day or two at my day rate. A couple of these jobs in a month could often cover my overhead, despite having a large studio with high rent and other expenses.

Or let’s say your client is a manufacturer of running clothing, and you shoot their catalog photographs from year to year. You would have an ongoing stream of shoots as styles changed, or even a single style in different colors, and you would hire models to make changes through the course of a few days, and the billings would be considerable, involving expenses for the models, assistants and stylists and perhaps makeup artists.

Now let’s enter AI. For your beverage client, it will not make sense any longer to shoot a string of similar photographs, say for example bottles with different labels, or even different sizes. Instead you’ll deliver a single photograph of a “blank” bottle, and the client’s AI software will blend in various labels, backgrounds and so forth, all in a few seconds. A shoot that might be a day or two will be reduced to a single shot that might take you an hour or two at most. I can even envision that single shot going away altogether, as the AI software will hold an inventory of various bottle sizes and formats, at which point the need for any studio time will go away entirely, and there goes your income stream.

For that clothing client, the same logic prevails. The AI software will generate virtual models, and then put them in the clothing line with all manner of colors and styles, all generated within the innards of a computer in a few seconds, and there goes another income stream for your studio.

Just a couple of years ago I would have dismissed this level of pessimism about the business of commercial and advertising photography. But today, I am not so sure. AI-generated images now look absolutely real. Realistically, vast chunks of work are going to disappear as AI solutions take their place. Will it make sense to maintain a commercial studio? Perhaps so, but in what shape or form? This will be a topic for a future commentary.

03/02/2026

In this post I am going to tie together two seemingly unrelated trends, namely AI and the resurgence of film photography.

The two trends could not seem further apart: in one, you click on some keys and a gigantic computer somewhere makes a picture for you, which you view on a screen; and in another you go through a series of physical steps, time-consuming steps at that, eventually ending with a tangible object, a photographic print on a medium made of wood fibers.

Is it not puzzling to wonder why both of these trends, which appear to be technological opposites, are growing at the same time?

I would argue that the one has created the demand for the other. While AI has made (or should I say “reduced”) photography to button clicks, it has also rebirthed the century-old practice of film photography, in which the process itself, with all of its chemicals and delays, provides a satisfaction of its own.

My studio went through the whole analog-to-digital transition, and in the commercial world today there isn’t much sense to shooting paying work on film. Digital capture and workflow is the way to go.

But now, I’m having a blast shooting film again, and going through all the messy steps of getting the image to a physical medium. In other words, the process itself is fun. Indeed, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in making pictures with antique, non-silver chemicals such as palladium printing, and building and using darkrooms and enlargers is also making a comeback. As the adage goes, “All things old are new again”.

An analogy might be the new trend of writing letters with pen and ink on fine letter paper. People have tired of email, it’s all junk mail anyway, so a handwritten note brings a nice feeling to both the writer and the recipient.

There’s a lesson here: we humans start to get uncomfortable when our tools and techniques diverge too far from what we can touch and feel, what is tangible. A digital image created by an AI program may be easy to make, but it always seems intangible, hence the renewed interest in film photography.

01/21/2026

Will AI kill off photography?

The question has to be raised: Will artificial intelligence software make the actual taking of pictures with a camera obsolete?

Why bother with all the trouble of going somewhere with a camera, setting up scenes and adding lighting, when you can retrieve the same visual result by pulling images from a server somewhere, and have a computer put it all together, perhaps giving you an even better result?

This rather frightening possibility seems a lot more real to me personally these days. To cite just one example, the latest version of Lightroom has a new “landscape” set of filters and assorted add-ons that allows you to build landscape ”photographs” by picking “enhancements” to the sky, the mountains, the foreground and so on, all selected from a list of options. The end result might be “better” on some scale of quality, but is it really?

Likewise, the latest version of Photoshop adds all manner of lighting effects that you can pour into your presumably “dull” photographs, all selected from a menu, and I suppose on some level that ”works”, but does it really?

If we scale out these software features to a final AI conclusion, might we see the need for an original photograph disappear altogether. Instead, might we simply talk into our computer and say something like “give me a landscape at sundown with an oak tree in the foreground“ and by the way, I need six variations for me to choose from. In a few seconds, the AI image pops up. It all looks more or less like a photograph, and who needs a photographer in the first place?

It is easy to dismiss this scenario as a kindof “head fake”, and unacceptable in the long run, but I’m not so sure. The whole world of cyberspace has fractured the notion of physical reality such that a lot of people make no distinction. If it looks good on a screen and makes us happy, why care if it represents something in front of a camera lens, or something conjured out of some giant image database? In this sense, why should we care one way or another, and actual physical reality becomes an old-fashioned way of thinking?

I am not ready to predict the end of photography for reasons that will take more words to explain here. I shall have more to say on this in future postings.

12/29/2025

The return of film photography

It has become quite clear that film photography is experiencing a renaissance. Film sales have been on an upward curve for about ten years, and new stocks of color and black and white emulsions seem to be arriving on a regular basis. There is even renewed interest in building darkrooms, which I for one had given up for dead.

Now that digital photography has matured and reached a level of excellence that matches, if not exceeds, what you can obtain from film, I have tried to understand this trend when measured against the inconvenience of film photography.

And there is no question that film photography is inconvenient: film stocks are expensive; you can’t see your results right away; processing is a chore at best; storage of negatives takes time and takes up space; and the list goes on.

I ran my studio all the way from shooting on 4x5 transparency film to a transition to high-end digital capture. By the time I retired, digital capture was totally logical from a business standpoint, and film photography was a quaint relic of an earlier age.

So why the resurgence of film?

I believe the simple answer has to do with the nature of digital photography itself. It is all about computers, screens, storage devices, the Internet, and the whole cyberspace world. There is something remote, invisible and unknowable about it all. When something doesn’t work right, getting the problem fixed is maddening, and you have constant fear of losing everything because of a software “glitch” or just a misplaced keystroke.

In contrast, film photography requires handling of a physical product (the film), which is at least something you can touch and feel, and after processing is something you can look at with your own eyes. The whole film workflow is tactile and mostly knowable in a way that digital imaging is not.

Perhaps we humans have unwittingly ventured so far into the world of cyberspace that we now crave those things that are concrete and touchable, and film photography is like that. The next few years will see if my thoughts on this prove to be accurate.

12/17/2025

Here is another black and white landscape. I used a 4x5 Linhof view camera and Ilford Delta 100 film, processed normally. I darkened the blue sky slightly by adding an orange filter over the lens. The photograph is evenly split between very high and very low tonal values.

12/15/2025

Tonal contrast is what makes for an interesting black and white photograph. I used a 4x5 view camera and Ilford Delta 100 film developed normally.

09/12/2025

This photo was intended to provoke a question: why is the one egg blue? Shot in my studio with a Leica S007 and 70mm lens.

Chiusano Photography

05/29/2026

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03/23/2026

03/14/2026

03/02/2026

01/21/2026

12/29/2025

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09/12/2025

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