08/26/2026
With senior portrait season right around the corner, I want to talk about AI for a second, because obviously I use it.
I use AI to help me brainstorm. I use it to help make flyers like the ones you see me posting. I use it to organize information, make excel sheets, clean up wording in bulk emails, and make the boring behind-the-scenes parts of running a small business a little easier.
But there is one place I do not use AI: my photography.
When you look at one of my finished photographs, what you see is what we actually created.
That green light? It was there.
The fog wrapping around an athlete? We made that happen on location.
The dramatic lighting? Those lights were set up and fired right there.
The colors, the shadows, the atmosphere, the crazy ideas? We created them in real life.
I'm not sitting at my computer afterward asking AI to turn an ordinary photograph into something it wasn't.
And that's something that's becoming increasingly important to me as AI-generated imagery becomes more common.
When you book a full session with me, we're not showing up, taking a couple basic pictures and hoping technology can make them interesting later.
We go ALL OUT.
I'm bringing the lights. I'm bringing the gear. I'm bringing the fog, gels, modifiers and whatever else we need to create the vision. We're moving things around. We're trying ideas. We're chasing the light. Sometimes we're making an absolute mess. π Sometimes an idea works exactly how I pictured it, and sometimes we change directions right there because something even better is happening.
That's the part I love.
We're creating in the moment.
And there's something really freaking cool about being able to look at the back of my camera and already see the bones of the final image.
AI didn't put you there.
AI didn't create that expression.
AI didn't know that the fog was going to roll through the light perfectly for half a second.
AI didn't catch the way you moved, laughed, celebrated, competed, or looked at the people you love.
We did.
Photography has always been art to me. Editing is absolutely part of that art, and I'll continue editing my photographs the way photographers have for yearsβcolor, contrast, retouching, cropping, bringing out the details and finishing the image in my style.
But I'm not interested in replacing the experience itself.
I want to make the cool s**t happen in front of my camera.
Because when you book me, you're not just paying for a finished JPG. You're paying for my creativity, my equipment, my experience, my ridiculous ideas, and the time we spend actually creating something together.
Maybe that's why my tagline has continued to fit what I do after all these years:
Because that's literally what we're doing.
We're capturing life.
In a creative light.
While it's actually happening π€