Why Metadata only matters for a single image

Hello friends

I was at an online class today with the master Joe McNally. A couple of nice people in the chat were really concerned that Joe was using TTL flash and that he was not sharing the exposure information for each image.

I’ve addressed the TTL vs Manual flash question a lot, so pick what you prefer and move on. I will do what suits me and so will you. If you do not understand why the question exists, check the prior article on this site.

On to metadata.

What is metadata. If the image is the primary data, and it is, metadata is information about the data. While metadata data structures can be enormous, most editors throw most of it away like parsley at Fred and Barney’s Brontoburger shack. If that reference means nothing to you, I feel bad for you. One set of metadata that generates a lot more noise than it ever should is exposure metadata. This is the information about the exposure settings in a specific image including shutter speed, aperture, ISO, exposure compensation, the presence of flash, flash exposure compensation yada yada yada.

It can be useful in analyzing that image, but lots of folks seem to think that if they know the metadata for one image, and they use it for another image, that other image will look like the first.

We call these people either delusional or victims of being lied to. Most often it’s the latter.

Those settings worked or didn’t work for the image being questioned. They will have no more meaning to a different image than the size of the seeds in the mustard jar in your cupboard. Copying settings from one image to another is a fool’s game, unless the second image is taken at the same time, in the same place, with the same subject, the same light. Otherwise it’s just toro poopoo.

You can certainly look at one of your images and examine its metadata as a guide to what you might do in a similar situation vis a vis how much depth of field you will want, or how much freezing of motion you want. You might also use it to determine what are acceptable ISO levels for you and your camera. That’s useful learning. However putting those same settings into your camera for a different situation is pointless and probably will not generate anything near what you want.

Take the opportunity to learn from your images and use that information for experimentation in future images. Perhaps this will give you some guidance into what kind of shutter speeds you need to freeze a running dog at 20 feet away. Or maybe it will give you some guidance on choosing an aperture to give you the depth of field you want when photographing your child toddling towards you. To use it otherwise is wasting your time and propagating a foolish myth.

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Do you have an idea for an article, tutorial, video or podcast? Do you have an imaging question unrelated to this article? Send me an email directly at ross@thephotovideoguy.ca or post in the comments.  When you email your questions on any imaging topic, I will try to respond within a day.

If you shop with B&H Photo Video, please consider doing so through the link on thephotovideoguy.ca as this helps support my efforts and has no negative impact whatsoever on your shopping experience. 

If you find the podcast, videos or articles of value, consider clicking the Donation tab in the sidebar of the website and buy me a coffee. Your donation goes to help me keep things going. 

I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.

More AI Software, More BS, Further Steps on the Road to Remove Human Creativity

It’s been a year since my last screed against AI in editing software.

The good news is that it isn’t really Artificial Intelligence because if it were, you’d already have been replaced and the world would not be awash in the volume of dogshit posted to Facebook and Instagram every day. AI does not need humans.

Art, or at least art as we have defined it, still needs humans. Change the definition and change the game of course, but I’m not one of those happy delusional rewriters of history that make up woke and cancel culture may they all rot in hell.

Today, I received a very pleasant message from the people at Skylum software. They make editing tools and some of them are quite good, although I am not personally a user of them. Other folks like them and that is cool. Skylum is very excited about their coming version of Luminar to be called Luminar AI. This places Skylum in the same bucket as a zillion other makers who are tacking AI onto everything to make it sound new, hip and exciting.

Certainly the idea that the software will use more enhanced algorithms to provide corrections to images will sound interesting to non-creatives and they are the likely customer for this stuff because it will help them put more lipstick on more pigs of images. That’s ok too since I do no participate in any social media recognizing it as the great collectivist down-leveller that it is, so I will not have to see the images. I won’t call it work, because there’s no creative work involved.

AI software as it is called is nothing more than a new set of makeup on what we used to call presets. Presets were just someone’s idea of what looked nice and were a quick way to make your images look like theirs. If that sounds like zero creativity, you would be correct. Presets are a panacea to the lazy and inept. I accept that some will say that such a statement is mean and hurtful. In the words of comic Ricky Gervais, whose brilliant evisceration of Hollyweird while hosting some pointless awards show is genius, “I don’t care”

There are people who say that great artists of the past would be all over this software and I do think that if Ansel Adams were alive today, he would leverage tools like Photoshop aggressively. Do I think that he would use presets or AI software? Not on your life! It would ironically amusing to see Adams slap an Ansel Adams preset on an image, but he would not do it. How do I know this?

Because Ansel Adams was an artist. Like Van Gogh, Rodin. Perhaps even like Michelangelo allow there were some payoffs and dispensations from the Catholic Church therein. An artist creates from vision, not from some programmed response. AI does not think, it uses a complex set of deterministic matrices to arrive at a conclusion, yet the conclusions were created by humans. Not individual humans but collectives of humans so as not to have any individualism come through. Creativity is about as individualistic a thing as there is if one is truly creative. If you are copying another’s style as a learning tool go for it. Knowledge is wonderful. If you are doing that so you can represent your work as being equivalent to someone else’s at best you are an idiot and at worst a thief of intellectual property. In either case, I doubt very much that you are still reading this article anyway.

I don’t care.

I’ve also heard it said that these tools help you learn. They teach you how to click a button, not on how to achieve your own style. There’s no actual learning involved. It’s more the grandchild of a Xerox copier. Do you as a creative aspire to be a Xerox copier? If you do, you’re going to love Instagram because it is precisely Same Shit Different Day. You will also love presets and AI editing software and you aren’t reading this anyway.

Here’s an alternative. Go shoot your own images with your own vision and if someone else doesn’t like them they are perfectly free to fuck off on the horse that they rode in on. You don’t need presets and you do not need AI. What you need is that wobbly grey mass sitting inside your skull and a little bit of self-worth.

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Do you have an idea for an article, tutorial, video or podcast? Do you have an imaging question unrelated to this article? Send me an email directly at ross@thephotovideoguy.ca or post in the comments.  When you email your questions on any imaging topic, I will try to respond within a day.

If you shop with B&H Photo Video, please consider doing so through the link on thephotovideoguy.ca as this helps support my efforts and has no negative impact whatsoever on your shopping experience. 

If you find the podcast, videos or articles of value, consider clicking the Donation tab in the sidebar of the website and buy me a coffee. Your donation goes to help me keep things going. 

I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.