A Trace of Something

I was watching two photographers critique motion blur photos.

The video was actually titled after another digression, something about Canon cameras. The part that stayed with me, though, was the motion blur critique. I expected shutter speeds, panning, timing, luck. Instead, I kept hearing another question underneath: is this real, or was it added later?

Almost every image seemed to lead there. The flickering light on the horse’s legs — a cheap streetlamp, or something created afterward. The dust on the sensor — real, or a deliberate old-film effect. The strange blur under the bird’s beak — a wing in motion, or a retouch nobody quite explained.

Neither of them was speaking against AI. Quite the opposite. They use it, they like it, and one of them now uses it constantly for product images. That was what struck me. Nobody announced a shift. Nobody stopped the conversation to say that photography had changed. It just happened, mid-sentence, while they were talking about something else, a sauce bottle, twelve of them stacked for an Amazon listing.

Why spend a day shooting it, he asked, when the generated version already looks finished?

For product photography, I can understand the question. Maybe I would ask the same one. A client needs a clean image. The bottle has to look good. The listing has to work. The story of how the image was made is probably not what matters most there.

But I kept thinking about motion blur.

Motion blur still feels, to me, like a trace of something. A body moves, the shutter stays open a little too long, and the scene does not quite hold still. Not proof, exactly. It can be simulated now, like almost everything else. But when it comes from the scene itself, there is still something in it that matters to me.

And that is where the video became interesting, or slightly troubling. AI was not really the problem. What troubled me was how easily the conversation moved from looking at photographs to asking how much of the image had been manufactured.

A video about motion blur should have been about time, at least a little.

Instead, I kept hearing a quieter question.

What was still photographed?

The photographs are gathered here:
Selected Works