AI Is Not The Painter

Related: Inspiration Is For Amateurs - the Bergman-driven Fujifilm project I mentioned above.

Two Rooms

Inspiration isn't romanticising the past. It's more like the painter metaphor.

Envision a building with two rooms. A model sits in the first. One painter walks in and paints the model exactly, no thought added. A copy. Another painter walks in, studies the model, then walks into the second room to paint. The second painting isn't the model. It's what the model made the painter think of.

How I'm using Canvas for Sicily is the second painter. I'm creating scenes in Canvas as reference, ideas that lead to inspiration rather than visuals to recreate.

Why Canvas

Canvas is a moodboard tool. That's the reason I'm using it here instead of Midjourney or Gemini. Image generation is one feature inside it, not the whole thing. Moodboarding is how photographers already plan a shoot, and Canvas fits that habit rather than replacing it.

The Process

Two steps.

Step one is the trip plan: where I'm going, who I'm photographing. General logistics. The unsexy stuff.

Step two is where Canvas comes in. I upload the reference images I already have: locations, what the models will be wearing. Then I ask Claude to generate prompts from those images. Prompts are the paragraphs AI tools speak to each other in. Those prompts go into Canvas, which generates scenes.

The Other Room

I've never been to Cretto di Burri, Gibellina Nuova, or the other places we're visiting. There's no time to pre-scout before the shoot. AI generation helps with posing and composition ideas. For everything else, I need photos taken by people who've been there.

Canvas lets me pull in hashtagged images from the locations I'm visiting alongside the AI scenes. Real photos from people who have stood where I'll be standing. That's the part of the moodboard that anchors the whole plan.

The scenes above are prompts. The photos here are the actual places, photographed by real people in the VSCO community.

AI generations get my head nodding. They warm up the thinking, give me compositions to react to. Real photos from people who've stood in these places do something the prompts can't. That's the part that gets me impatient for the flight. Nothing beats the real thing.

The Wingman

Those AI generated above scenes aren't the photos I'm going to make in Sicily. They're the model in the first room. Little reminders to push my creativity once I get there.

AI isn't going to crush creativity. It also isn't going to do the work. It's a wingman for ideas. At least that's how I'm using it.