A.I. Has Been On Your Camera For Years!

There’s an interesting idea at the heart of this observation, but it should probably be framed a little differently. To be clear, I don’t think autofocus, autoexposure, subject recognition, and the presence of computational photography have made people less capable of being good  photographers. What the modern camera has done is move many of the traditional photographic decisions from the human behind the camera to the camera itself. In that sense, this is a form of Artificial Intelligence—not necessarily generative A.I., but systems that can analyze a scene and make judgments without any input from the photographer “running” the camera.

Consider what a modern camera is doing every time you press the shutter:

• It identifies eyes, faces, birds, animals, cars, or aircraft.
• It predicts where the subject will move next.
• It calculates exposure from thousands of sample points.
• It determines white balance.
• It recognizes scenes like sunsets, portraits, sports, or landscapes.
• It may combine multiple exposures, reduce noise, sharpen selectively, and recover highlights before you even see the image.

A Modern Auto-Everything Camera uses non-generative Artificial Intelligence

None of those are simply “automatic.” They are decisions based on algorithms trained from millions of examples. Twenty years ago, all of these decisions belonged almost entirely to the photographer behind the camera.

This reminds me of aviation. A pilot can fly a modern jet almost entirely through automation. The flight computer handles trim, navigation, fuel management, and even landing. That doesn’t mean the pilot isn’t a pilot—but it does mean the pilot is doing a different job. They’re managing systems instead of directly flying the airplane.

Photography has undergone a similar shift. What attracts many people—including what attracted me to the Leica M6 and the Leica M11-P—is the opposite experience. The camera delegates almost nothing and places the responsibility back with the photographer.

The Manual Operation Of The M11-P And The M6 asks:

• Where should I focus?
• What should the exposure be?
• Should I wait?
• Should I move?
• Is this worth one of only 36 frames?

The camera doesn’t answer those questions. It asks you to answer them. That creates a very different psychological relationship with photography. I am drawn to tools that preserve craftsmanship rather than replace it. I appreciate cameras that reward knowledge instead of automation, whether it’s my Leica M11-P used in a deliberate rangefinder style or now with a new Leica M6 rangefinder using film stock.

I also think there’s an important distinction between picture taking and photography. A picture can be produced almost automatically. A photograph is usually preceded by intention.

The shutter button is only a tiny part of photography. Seeing the light, anticipating the moment, choosing a focal length, deciding what to exclude, waiting another thirty seconds because the scene isn’t quite right yet—those are photographic acts. A camera can increasingly perform the mechanics, but intention still belongs to the person.

I am somewhat cautious in saying that modern cameras have turned most people into picture snappers. I think the cameras have lowered the technical barrier, which is actually a very wonderful thing for a lot of people. Many people who would never have learned exposure theory can now make their very own meaningful photographs of their families or travels. That’s a genuine benefit.

When The Decisions Are With The Camera Not The Photographer

The downside is subtler. Because the camera succeeds so often, many users never feel the need to understand why it succeeded. The automation becomes invisible. It’s like driving a car with an automatic transmission: you can become an excellent driver without ever understanding how a clutch works. But someone who drives a manual often develops a different awareness of the machine.

The manual camera like the M11-P and the M6 is the photographic equivalent of a manual transmission.

Ironically, the M6 isn’t making you a better photographer because it lacks AI. It’s making you think before every frame. That pause—that small interval between seeing and pressing the shutter—is where much of photography has always lived.

Here is a provocative way to summarize my philosophy:

The history of photography has been a steady transfer of photographic decisions from the photographer to the camera. The Leica M6 and M11-P are a couple of the few modern cameras that gives those decisions back to the photographer behind the camera.

To me, this philosophy is less a criticism of technology than a celebration of agency. It explains why so many experienced photographers describe using a camera like a Leica M6 not as taking pictures differently, but as thinking differently.