I asked AI to Critique a photograph that I took, for merit in professional quality, intention, and just an in general critique... here is what it had to say.
📌 Professional Quality
✅ Strengths
Focus & Sharpness: The image is crisp where it needs to be. Both the rider and the horse are in focus, with detailed texture visible in the horse’s braids, the rider’s beard, and clothing.
Exposure: Exposure is handled well. There is good retention of detail across highlights and shadows, even with the challenging combination of a dark horse and lighter clothing.
Composition: The subject fills the frame effectively. The rider and horse are placed in a way that naturally draws the viewer’s attention. The horse’s head position and the rider’s expression provide interest.
📌 Intention
The image conveys a clear and authentic documentation of a rider and horse in a working or event environment.
If the intent was to capture a genuine, unstaged moment in context, the photo achieves this. The expressions and body language of both horse and rider communicate experience and calmness.
The image does not suggest staged or controlled portraiture, but rather an in-the-moment scene. This aligns with event photography or photojournalistic intentions.
📌 General Assessment
From a technical and objective standpoint:
Strengths: The image is competently executed in terms of exposure, focus, and composition for an event or documentary-style photograph.
Limitations: The environmental distractions (background clutter) and flat lighting are the key areas where the image could be strengthened for a higher level of professional polish.
Context matters: For event coverage or documentary purposes, this is a solid image. For marketing, portfolio, or promotional use, more control over background and light would push it to the next level.
It is interesting to see how a computer views and critiques a body of work, especially when you provide no context for it to go on. It clearly identified that this was taken at an event, where background control is something I, as a photographer, have very little influence over—unless I want to do a lot of post-processing after the fact. That kind of editing takes away from the authenticity of the moment, and it’s not something I like doing with event images.
It also pointed out lighting as a key issue, which is honestly just to be expected in indoor arenas. As a photographer, that’s always a frustration, so it’s fun (and validating) to see the computer pick up on it as well.
What I found coolest was seeing the computer accurately recognize the intention behind the image and how it evaluated the style and quality. This photo was made in an indoor arena with variable lighting, lots of background distractions, and moving subjects. It captured a brief moment in time as I mulled an idea over and wanted to make a few images to play with styling—though I know indoor arenas won’t truly serve the project I’d like to accomplish.
The takeaway from this experiment? Even the computer can see the level of quality in my images that reflects my professionalism in tricky shooting environments—and even without direction, it’s bothered by the same challenges that often annoy me when photographing events.