When the Spell Broke.

I studied photography at university between 2002 and 2005, at a moment when the medium was about to change completely.

When I started, photography felt like a remarkable skill to possess. You had to understand light: how to meter it, shape it and work with what was available. You needed to know your camera and equipment inside out. More than anything, you needed enough confidence in your ability and your vision to know that you had captured the image—even though you couldn’t see it yet.

That was the challenge.

You pressed the shutter and committed the image to film. There was no screen on the back of the camera and no instant confirmation. You couldn’t zoom in to check the focus or study a histogram to make sure the exposure was right. You had to trust your light meter, your judgement and your experience.

Then you walked away.

Somewhere inside that little roll of film, you hoped, was the photograph you had imagined.

A 35mm roll gave you up to 36 exposures. With medium-format film, you might have only 12. Every frame mattered. Each photograph carried a small cost, but it also required a decision. You didn’t simply hold down the shutter and hope that one of hundreds of images would work. You observed, composed, measured and waited.

The process continued in the darkroom. Film had to be developed before you could finally see what you had captured. From there came contact sheets, test strips, enlarging, dodging, burning and the careful balancing of exposure and contrast.

An image would slowly appear in the developing tray under the red light.

The whole process felt like a mixture of alchemy, foresight, conjuring and imagination. Light entered the camera for a fraction of a second and left an invisible trace on a strip of film. Through chemistry, timing and judgement, that trace became a physical image.

It was like casting a spell.

Then the spell broke.

Photography was already becoming digital

Photoshop had been around for some time by then, so photography was already partially digitised.

A common workflow was to shoot on film, develop it, produce an enlarged print and then scan that print into a computer. Digital editing came at the end of an otherwise analogue process.

But working in Photoshop was very different from the experience we know today. Computers were slower, the software was less sophisticated and many of the tools we now take for granted didn’t exist.

Even removing dust from a scanned image could be laborious. Without modern healing tools, you had to find a similar-looking area elsewhere in the photograph, clone those pixels and carefully blend them over the mark. Each small edit might take five or ten seconds to appear on the screen, only for the result to look slightly wrong.

Cleaning and adjusting a single photograph could take hours.

Despite this, film remained the professional choice for capturing the original image. Digital tools might help prepare the finished photograph, but the knowledge and craft involved in making the exposure still mattered.

Then, just as I was beginning to feel that I was mastering film, there was a leap.

The camera began making the decisions

Professional-quality digital cameras became affordable.

Suddenly, almost anyone could walk into a shop and buy a camera capable of producing technically excellent images. The camera could meter the light, focus incredibly quickly and select settings for different conditions that had already been determined by the manufacturer.

The photograph appeared instantly on the screen.

That changed everything.

There was no longer the same uncertainty about whether you had captured what you needed. You could simply look at the image and check. If it wasn’t right, you could adjust something and take another.

There was no film to change and no strict limit of 12 or 36 exposures. A memory card gave you hundreds, and eventually thousands, of opportunities to get the photograph right.

It seemed to happen overnight. The challenge—and much of the ritual—of committing an image to film had been diminished.

At least, that was how it felt at the time.

But something else was happening too. The camera wasn’t just making photography easier; it was beginning to remove many of the decisions that affected how a photograph looked.

Aperture, shutter speed, focus, white balance, contrast and colour could all be selected or adjusted automatically. The camera would assess the scene and try to produce what its manufacturer considered a correctly exposed, properly focused and pleasing image.

Those automated choices weren’t necessarily bad. They were often remarkably accurate. But they weren’t neutral either.

A photographer might deliberately underexpose an image, allow movement to blur, sacrifice detail in the shadows or choose an unusual colour balance. These weren’t always mistakes to be corrected. They were decisions that contributed to the character and meaning of the photograph.

When the camera makes those decisions automatically, we can stop thinking about them.

If enough people rely on the same automated systems, working towards the same idea of a technically correct image, the results inevitably begin to look alike. The camera’s defaults become the photographer’s style.

Automation tends to smooth away the unusual choices, imperfections and risks through which an individual visual language develops. It encourages consistency, but consistency can easily become homogeneity.

The easier the technology makes it to avoid making decisions, the fewer opportunities we have to make the image distinctly our own.

What happens when the process becomes effortless?

The specialist knowledge that had taken years to acquire was suddenly being packaged inside the camera. Skills that had separated a trained photographer from someone who simply owned a camera appeared to be losing their value.

It would have been easy to conclude that the craft was disappearing.

But photography didn’t disappear. It changed.

Digital cameras made it easier to produce a correctly exposed, sharply focused image. They removed much of the uncertainty and lowered the cost of experimentation. More people could participate, learn and create.

That was a good thing.

But making something easier doesn’t automatically make us more creative. Sometimes the difficulty is the very thing that forces us to think.

A limit of 12 frames changes how you look at a scene. Manually choosing an aperture makes you consider depth. Setting the shutter speed makes you decide whether movement should be frozen or allowed to flow. Waiting to see the film forces you to form a clear judgement at the moment the photograph is taken.

Each technical decision is also a creative decision.

Remove too many of those decisions and it becomes possible to produce a competent image without ever really deciding what it should look like.

The technology gives us more chances to get something right, but it can also make us less certain about what “right” actually means.

The skill moved—but it could also be surrendered

Digital cameras couldn’t decide what was worth photographing.

They couldn’t give someone an eye for composition, an understanding of people or a sense of timing. They couldn’t create an original idea or determine what an image should communicate. They couldn’t replace curiosity, taste, empathy or intent.

The technical barrier had fallen, but the creative challenge remained.

In some ways, it became more important. When everyone could produce a technically acceptable photograph, technical competence alone was no longer enough. The value moved away from simply knowing how to operate the equipment and towards knowing what to do with it.

However, that only happens when we continue making conscious choices.

Automation can create space for creativity by removing repetitive work. It can also weaken creativity when we accept its decisions without questioning them.

The danger isn’t that a camera can select the settings. The danger is that we stop asking why those settings were selected, what alternatives were available and how a different choice might change the result.

If we surrender enough decisions, we eventually surrender authorship.

I couldn’t see all of that clearly at the time. I was too close to the change—and perhaps too invested in the skills I had worked hard to acquire.

I had mistaken some of the process for the purpose, but the process had also taught me how to think.

We have been here before

I think about that period whenever a new technology appears to threaten an established skill.

Today, the same conversations are happening around artificial intelligence. Work that once required specialist knowledge can now be produced more quickly and by many more people. Tasks that took hours can sometimes be completed in seconds.

That can feel unsettling, particularly when the technology begins doing something you spent years learning to do.

Once again, automation is presented as a way to remove effort. But effort and inefficiency aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes the work we remove is where judgement, originality and understanding were formed.

When everyone begins with the same tools, models and default suggestions, there is a risk that everything converges towards the same answer. The writing sounds similar. The imagery looks familiar. The ideas are polished but predictable.

The result may be technically proficient, just as an automatically exposed photograph is technically proficient. But proficiency is not the same as personality.

Tools don’t inevitably destroy creativity. They change where creativity is required—and make it easier for us to avoid exercising it.

Access to a camera does not automatically make someone a photographer. Access to Photoshop does not make someone a designer. Access to artificial intelligence does not make someone a strategist, writer or creative thinker.

The tool can help create the output, but it cannot take responsibility for the intention behind it.

Looking back, digital photography didn’t destroy the magic. It removed some of the mystery from the process and placed the creative emphasis somewhere else.

But to find it, you have to resist the temptation to let the technology make every decision for you.

The darkroom spell may have been broken, but the need for foresight, imagination and vision never went away.

It simply became a choice.

← Back to all notes