With Your Eyes Open — The AI Workflow
Two online days mapping machine assistance honestly: where it serves photographers, where it replaces judgement, and a written policy you can defend — plus the workflow that saves hours without outsourcing your eye.
The workshop
AI has moved into every stage of the photographic workflow — culling, masking, noise, retouching, generation — and pretending otherwise is no longer teaching. This two-day online intensive maps the terrain with the lights on: tools demonstrated at full strength, interrogated at full strength, and fenced where lines matter, with the disclosure norms of competitions, editorial use, and the LUMENS community itself as case studies.
You leave with an assisted workflow measured against your own files (the time savings are logged, not claimed) and a written personal policy on what, in your images, you can still vouch for. Devika Menon moderates the ethics sessions; the machine does not moderate anything.
Devika Menon
Kochi · Interiors · sequencing
Devika photographs rooms during monsoon and edits them like short stories. Her teaching is about order: which image speaks first, and which is allowed to stay quiet.
- Full-strength demonstrations, full-strength interrogation
- The timed workflow: savings logged on your own files
- Disclosure norms mapped across competitions and editorial
- Your written policy — the deliverable that outlasts the tools
- Your usual editor with current AI-assisted features (trial versions listed in joining notes)
- A folder of your own recent work for the workflow timing exercise
- Opinions, held loosely for 48 hours
- Two live days
- The tool-category reference (updated quarterly; a year's updates included)
- The policy template and workflow worksheets
- A fortnight's recording access
- Software subscriptions
- A verdict — you leave with your own, which is the point
Online — two live days, Central European Time
“I arrived a purist and left a purist — but a faster one, with reasons. The culling assistance saves me three hours a week and my policy says exactly where the machine stops.”
“The caption exercise — 'every generated pixel is a caption problem' — reframed the entire debate for me. Best two days of professional development I've done online.”
Questions, answered
Is this pro-AI or anti-AI?
Pro-photographer, doctrinally neutral, and allergic to hype in both directions. The tools are shown working and shown failing; the policy you write is yours.
Will this be outdated in six months?
The specific tools shift monthly, which is why the deliverable is a framework plus a quarterly-updated reference (a year's updates included). Frameworks age like methods; tool lists age like milk — we teach accordingly.
14 seats remaining.
Departures are deliberately small and tend to fill from the newsletter. Booking places no charge — we confirm your seat personally, then arrange payment.