Turisti e Gente del Posto
A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see, to quote Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).
This spirit of this series, from a stay in Bologna and Florence in May of 2023, reminded me of the earlier Tourists and Locals sequence so much that I gave it the same name, but translated into Italian.
See note at the bottom of the page for more information about the one use of AI focus correction for the image above.
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Use of AI image correction
To my mind, a true “street photograph” is one that captures a moment in time as the photographer saw it, without the addition or removal of any part. I will crop images to improve composition, but I will not change the content within the crop. I will correct exposure and color balance, I will convert to black and white, but I will not remove a fire hydrant or add a reflection, etc. However, there is one image on this web site where I allowed myself to use an AI tool to correct the focus of a photograph: the one of the woman in white show at the top of this page and here:
This photograph is perhaps my favorite image from this series, but I am conflicted about my use of AI to correct my bad focus. I failed to capture the moment as I saw it, and I fear that using AI to correct it is a step too far. I love the image and want to show it, but I have to be honest and flag that AI was used.
See the blog post, “Successful Street Photo or AI cheat?” on Medium for a longer discussion of this image, the use of AI to render it, and how I probably won’t use it again.