A few weeks ago, I shared some Instagram stories about how I’m using AI in my business, and the response was huge. Clearly, we have feelings about the magical robots, don’t we?

I have opinions too (shocking, I know), but mostly I’ve found the emergence of AI over the last few years to be helpful for my small business.

The things that scare me:

• AI can basically create any photo you’d like. Will my job be obsolete one day? Maybe more so on the school side of things than family or newborn sessions, but I hope my photos have enough feeling and emotion that they’re not at risk of being replaced by a computer.
• Are we all going to rely on AI so much that our brains turn to mush? Ok, maybe not full mush, but partial mush? If we let a computer do all our writing, editing and creative thinking will we slowly (or quickly!) get dumber?

Ways I’m currently using AI as a photographer:

• Basic edits – AI has saved me countless hours with colour and exposure correction. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to find the right program and train it on my editing style, but now my workflow includes running every image through AI for basic edits like colour, exposure, applying presets, and background isolation. (My current go-to program is Imagen and I use a custom profile). I still touch every single image for advanced edits, though as I fully believe that’s what makes my photos have life.
• Complicated cloning – I hate air vents, plugs, light switches, animal fur on clothes, and random background distractions (garbage cans, cars, you name it) in photos. These used to take me HOURS to edit out. Now, AI lets me select an area, describe what I want changed, and I watch the magic happen. It’s not always perfect, and I sometimes revert to my old-school methods, but more often than not, it works. That said, you 100% need to know how to do it manually first, so you can spot when AI’s solution looks off or go back to hand edits when it just can’t get it right.
• Automating workflows – THIS is a total game-changer. The school side of my business has a ton of manual tasks: renaming thousands of files, embedding student numbers into photos, resizing images for school admin, and so on. I’ve been using ChatGPT to suggest new ways to automate these tasks. It has helped me figure out Python scripts and to better utilize tools like Zapier for multi-step automations. (Can we talk about how cool it is that now a booking comes in via Acuity and the info auto-generates on a new spreadsheet line! in Google Sheets?). When something doesn’t work, I just paste the code back into ChatGPT, ask what’s wrong, and get a corrected version in seconds. It’s also been amazing for creating complicated formulas in Sheets or helping me figure out how to link pages and such.
• Website design – I still fully believe that a human design for a website is the best design (because as we’ve discussed, it needs personality), but ChatGPT has helped me see my pages from a client’s POV. It ensures the important info is front and centre and helps with consistency. For example, when I updated the “About” page on the school site last week, I wanted to include new bios for Julie and Janice. I had the bios written but wanted the lengths to match. I plugged the bios into ChatGPT and asked it to keep major content and sentences but to make them all relatively the same length. Boom. Done. Then, I asked for feedback on the layout, and it suggested simple tweaks like adding spacing and lines under titles.

I’m sure we’re going to see so many AI advances over the next couple of years and keeping up with the changes will be a job in itself, but for now, I’m thankful for the help!

Chat soon,

Kelly