Tag Archive for: safeguarding

Your family deserves more than an algorithm

When you book a family or newborn photographer, you are trusting them with something incredibly personal.

Not just photographs, but photographs of your children. Your home. Your relationships.

So it is completely reasonable to ask:

Who sees my photographs?

How are they edited?

Is AI involved?

We believe in honesty and that you should know the answer.

As photographers, Andy and I do use modern technology where it genuinely helps us. But there is an important distinction between using AI as a tool and handing an entire gallery over to AI to make decisions about your family.

We choose the former and use it sparingly.

AI can be a useful tool for photographers

There are some incredibly clever AI photography editing tools available now, and we would be doing you a disservice if we pretended otherwise.

AI can help with small, specific jobs during the editing process. For example, it might help us to efficiently remove an unwanted object from the background, tidy up a distracting element, or assist with a very particular part of an image.

Used carefully and sparingly, these tools can save time without changing the story the photograph is telling.

But for us, that is where the line is.

AI is a tool we can pick up when we need it. It isn’t the photographer.

Your gallery isn’t handed over to an algorithm

There are now photography editing systems that can process large numbers of images using AI. They can analyse photographs, learn editing preferences and apply adjustments across an entire gallery.

Some can even assist with selecting which photographs are worth keeping, using AI to cull your gallery.

That might sound wonderfully convenient. But it isn’t how we work.

When you receive a gallery from Nest & Fable, your images have been individually considered and hand edited by us.

We decide which photographs tell your story. We decide which expressions, interactions and little moments are worth keeping. We decide how each photograph should look.

We don’t ask a computer to look through hundreds of photographs of your family and decide which ones deserve to make it into your gallery.

Because we don’t think your family story should be reduced to an algorithm.

We don’t want AI making decisions about your children

This feels particularly important when photographing families and newborns.

A photograph of your child isn’t simply a collection of pixels.

It might be the photograph where they have that little half-smile you’ve been trying to capture for months. It might be the way your toddler looks at you. It might be a slightly imperfect photograph where everyone is laughing and nobody is looking at the camera.

An automated system doesn’t understand the significance of those moments.

We do.

Our job isn’t simply to produce technically perfect photographs. It is to recognise the photographs that mean something.

Sometimes the photograph with the slightly messy hair, the funny expression or the person half out of frame is the one you’ll treasure most.

Your images aren’t there to train a machine

We also understand why parents are increasingly concerned about photographs of their children being uploaded to third-party AI services.

It is perfectly reasonable to want to know what happens to your images once they leave your photographer’s computer.

Our approach is deliberately cautious.

We do not use AI to process your entire gallery as part of our standard editing workflow, and we do not hand your complete family gallery over to an AI system to make wholesale editing or selection decisions.

If we use an AI-assisted tool for a specific editing task, it is because we have deliberately chosen to use it for that particular task within Photoshop, rather than because an automated system is processing your entire collection for us.

We never upload your images to a standalone third-party AI editing service.

And when it comes to photographs containing children, we take an even more cautious approach: we never use Generative Fill on images containing children (as this grants AI access to the image as a whole).

For us, there is a significant difference between using a specific tool within our professional editing software for a carefully considered purpose and uploading an entire collection of family photographs to a separate AI service.

We believe photographers have a responsibility to understand the privacy policies and data practices of the tools they use, particularly when those tools involve photographs of children.

Photography should still feel personal

There is something quite lovely about knowing that the photographs sitting in your gallery have actually been looked at.

Not just processed.

Not just batch edited.

Looked at.

Someone has noticed the tiny details.

The way your hands meet. The expression on your child’s face.

The photograph where you are laughing so hard that you’ve completely forgotten the camera is there.

The image that technically isn’t perfect but somehow feels exactly like you.

That is the service we want to provide.

Technology can help us. We aren’t afraid of that.

But we don’t want technology to replace the human part of what we do.

So, what happens to your photographs?

In simple terms:

You book us.

We photograph your family.

We choose your images.

We personally review your photographs and select the images that tell your story.

We edit your gallery.

Your photographs are individually considered and edited by us, rather than simply being sent through an automated AI editing system.

AI may occasionally assist with a specific task.

For example, removing an unwanted background distraction. But it is used as a tool under our direction, not as an autonomous editor of your gallery.

You remain in control of your images.

We will always aim to be transparent about how we work, because we think you have every right to ask questions about photographs of your family.

Connection over automation

At Nest & Fable, our approach has always been about connection over perfection.

That applies to our editing too.

We aren’t interested in creating photographs that look as though they have been processed by the same algorithm as everyone else’s.

We want your photographs to look like your family.

Natural. Honest. A little bit imperfect.

And completely yours.

AI is here, and we don’t think photographers need to be afraid of using technology responsibly.

But we do think there is a difference between using a clever tool to remove a distracting object from a photograph and handing an entire gallery of somebody’s children over to a computer and asking it to decide what matters.

At Nest & Fable, the decisions stay human.

Because your family isn’t a dataset.

Your story deserves to be seen by a person.