🍏NEW YEAR RESOLUTION🍏

Also this time, holidays are nearly over, and I’ve done very little in terms of retouching my photos.
I am on holiday after all, but I always feel guilty because I had planned to do more.
I also understood that my main problem is not doing too little, but doing too much!
I mean being too picky and accurate in my retouching, whilst I know nobody even bothers to get such perfectly natural photos.
In fact, with the arrival of AI, I should hold back even more in my retouching, leave some small blemishes on the skin of my models, and expose even more the organic nature of my work!

So my resolution for 2026 is to force myself to be less pedantic in my retouching, and try to push out more of my work, especially on the Archive, maybe uploading more boxes on BentBox, but overall getting things DONE, and not just accumulating work.

What gave me this idea is the photo of the cat in Chiavenna I’ve already showed you in several occasions (check out today’s bonus photo).
It is the third time, across various platforms, that I’ve been accused of having generated this image with AI, and I realized there is no way I can demonstrate in a straightforward way that it is a genuine photo of a real cat, without producing the entire sequence of raw files with all attached metadata.
But then I spotted a cigarette stub on the manhole cover in the right side of the image, on the edge of the frame and slightly out of focus, something the AI would have never thought of adding.
I was happy for not having retouched the cigarette but, because I had the chance to point it out to my accuser as a further indication of the genuine nature of the photo.
One more proof that the less I retouch, the better my real life credentials become.

The shooting I was hoping to conclude during these holidays, is the one of Maria in the Ex Manicomio di Monbello, at least this one, but I still have a lot to do.
For today I selected 3 BW photos from this shooting, shot on the Leica M10M (a Monochrom Monday this time), with files exposed at 6400 ISO and pushed about 1,5 stop more in post production, giving that grainy and abstract look.
But you can still feel the raw beauty of Maria filtering through the medium of digital photography and running over us.
We are defenseless in front of her charm, and no amount of computational crap can give us the same thrills as the real thing.

2 more photos of Maria today, on my regular social media feed and on Deviant Art Subscriptions.

If you want to learn more about the Bramley Apple Project or Archives, or DA subscriptions, ask me on bramleyapple@yahoo.com