AI as an apprentice
This exhibit holds twelve of my photographs, made from 2022 to 2026. Each one hangs twice: the raw frame as my camera caught it, and beside it the edits an AI agent made from that same click.
The photographs
I’m Sparsh Gupta, and every frame here is one I stood in front of and took myself, on long drives, layovers and cold mornings. Nothing was generated, sourced or borrowed. The exhibit is one of the tangents on Tangent Ideas, where the larger idea behind the name lives.
How the edits are made
The edits come from an agent I’m teaching to work in Adobe Lightroom, with the same tools a photographer reaches for: exposure and tone curves, color grading, masks that isolate a sky or a subject, local adjustments and grain.
It learns the way people do, by being corrected. Claude, from Anthropic, studies the raw frame and makes an edit. Gemini, from Google, judges it against a master printer’s standard and sends back notes: a shadow crushed too far, a glow that looks false, a grade that plays it too safe. Claude tries again, and round after round the print gets closer.
I review every result and choose what reaches the wall. It is slow by design, and the teaching isn’t finished; I’m still refining the agent with each new set of photographs.
What it will and won’t do
Everything happens inside Lightroom, on the photograph I took. The agent can reshape light, color and tone, work on one part of the frame at a time, add grain or a soft glow, crop, or carry an image all the way to black and white. It never adds, removes or replaces anything in the scene, and no image here was generated from a prompt. Editing can draw out what the light already gave; it cannot invent what wasn’t there.
The looks
Each photograph is developed more than once. Open any work and you’ll find the raw frame beside two or three finished looks, each with its own name and one of three roles. The Master print is the honest develop, the scene as a careful eye would print it, and it’s the one you see first. The Machine’s eye lets the agent off the leash: a bold, stylized reading, an interpretation rather than a record. Some photographs also carry an Alternate, a third take that answers the other two.
Using the photographs
These photographs are my own. If you’d like to use one, I’d be glad to hear from you; just write to me first.