What is going on here???
As you can see, my portfolio is gone.Two reasons for that.
Adobe is evil
I used Adobe Lightroom as my primary photography organiser and processor tool for over 15 years. I couldn't imagine processing the volume of the photographs I created over the last 20 years. At some point my portfolio had over 150 THOUSAND photos. And those were only the ones I retained. Events (concerts, other public events), travel, street, fashion/beauty, weddings, product... You name it.
Over the last few years I withdrewfrom most of my photo activities (apart from event/street/travel) so the need for the tool dwindled. But I still enjoyed having my portfolio displayed using Adobe Portfolio - easy, slick. But over the last few years, using Adobe made me feel dirty. The company excelled at anti-competitive practices, stealing people's work to train their GenAI engine without consent. That's just the tip of an iceberg. Then came censorship, attacks on journalists trying to make people aware of Adobe's practices.
Recent attack on Lunduke Journal was a straw that broke the camel's back. Supporting Adobe felt like supporting Nazi Germany.
So... Enough is enough. I terminated my Adobe licence, effective immediately. It means my online portfolio is unavailable. Some of my work can be found on instagram for now (I know, another evil company, but it is what it is).
Generative AI destroyed the hobby
Over the last few years, the demand for photography dropped drastically. It started happening before the advent of AI - people simply DON'T CARE anymore - there is an oversaturation of audio-visual stimulation as it is, while the sensibilities dwindle - people can't distinct (and don't care!) between a good photograph and a random snapshot.
And then came GenAI revolution. Photographers and other creators realised their work was ingested by algorithms without consent and used to generate cheaply looking images and videos so now... Everyone is an artist... All they need to do is type into a prompt: "generate me a picture of a castle at sunset" and flood Instagram and Pinterest with the results. And people seem to be loving it? So I asked myself - what's the point? What's the point of spending all that money, time and energy to producte stunning pictures if no one will bother to actually go to my website and see the images there? Too much effort. But the AI bots will gladly consume that content, digest and spit out their "own" interpretation of it.
What's worse - my fashion/beauty/portrait section could be used without consent to generate images of questionable morality, and the last thing I want is a woman who posed to my photos 15 years ago to find her face re-generated by AI, slapped on some nude content.
So I decided to take a break. My Instagram "portfolio" became a photo blog of my hikes in the Scottish Highlands - all other photograhy was taken down.