Where AI Fits in Our Studio (and Where It Doesn’t)

I use AI all through this studio, and I love what it can do. Here’s how we keep what your customers see real, for every brand we produce content for.

I test AI tools constantly. Image generation, editing automation, content planning, production workflows. I experiment with what’s new, evaluate what’s improved, and discard what isn’t ready. It’s part of how I run this studio.

That matters to you because the landscape is changing fast, and the difference between a studio that understands these tools and one that’s either ignoring them or using them carelessly is going to show up in your results. I’d rather you work with someone who’s already in it and knows where the lines are.

In our creative studio, AI sharpens briefs before a shoot, multiplies what each production day yields, builds the systems and workflows behind publishing, and visualises concepts before they’re built. Nothing that misrepresents a brand’s product, people, or process ever goes out. Every client gets a framework for what stays real and why it matters to their customers.

How We Work With AI for Each Client

Every brand is different. What’s right for one client’s content isn’t right for another’s. So before we start any production work, we talk it through.

If there are aspects of your brief that could benefit from AI, whether that’s extending the outputs from a shoot, visualising a concept that hasn’t been built yet, creating additional content formats, or building the systems and workflows that keep your content moving, I’ll walk you through what’s available, what it looks like in practice, and whether it’s the right choice for your brand. If there’s something you want to achieve, we’ll discuss the best tools to make it happen, across everything available, in the right way for your audience.

Then we build that into the production plan. Every brand we work with has a clear framework for how content gets made, what tools are used, and where the boundaries sit. As AI tools develop and improve, we revisit that framework together. Something that wasn’t ready six months ago might now be at a standard worth using. Something that worked well might have a better alternative. We adjust the system alongside the developments, but your brand’s values and mission stay at the centre of every decision.

You bring the knowledge of your business. I bring the knowledge of what’s possible. The work starts from that conversation.

What AI Actually Does in Our Workflow

Sharper creative direction before the shoot. Before we commit your budget to a production day, AI helps us explore visual directions quickly. Mood concepts, colour palette testing, composition ideas, styling references. The creative conversation happens faster, the brief gets tighter, and less gets wasted on the shoot day itself. When a client struggles to describe the direction they’re after, generating a few quick reference images bridges the gap between what they’re imagining and what I need to understand. It’s faster than trawling Pinterest boards and more specific to their actual brand.

Cleaner editing and production. AI tools have changed how we move through retouching and asset preparation. Batch colour correction, format adaptation, initial background removal. Tasks that used to swallow hours of repetitive manual work no longer do, which means more of the budget goes toward creative decisions and less toward processing.

But knowing where to automate and where to stay hands-on matters. Background removal is a good example. AI tools handle it well for clean-edged products with strong contrast. For a textured wool hat or a multicolour tweed, automated cut-outs lose the fine edge detail that communicates the richness of the fabric. Colour contamination from the original background is another issue these tools don’t handle reliably yet. In those cases, I use AI to speed up the initial pass and refine the edges manually. Faster than doing everything by hand, but the quality isn’t left to the tool alone.

Seeing ideas before they’re built. Some of the most exciting work AI does in this studio is showing people the future. We recently built a demonstration piece, Vantage, with a garden design by Leonie Cornelius, compositing her concept design into footage of a real house to show how a concept can translate into a client’s actual space, and what adaptations surface when the two meet. That kind of visualisation helps a founder iterate on an idea, and helps them show it to the people who need convincing, long before anything gets built. It’s imagined imagery doing exactly what imagined imagery is for, and nobody is misled for a second.

More content from every shoot. This is where AI makes the biggest practical difference. A single production day can now generate far more usable content than it could two years ago. Reformatting for different platforms, generating variations for seasonal campaigns, adapting compositions for different aspect ratios and placements. We can create short video content from still photography, building subtle movement between captured images that keeps the product representation true while adding the motion that brings it to life. Work that would have needed additional shoot days or hours of manual post-production can now be built from the assets we’ve already captured.

Stronger content strategy. AI is genuinely useful for structuring content calendars, identifying gaps, drafting outlines, and organising the thinking behind a content programme. It accelerates the strategic groundwork so we can spend more time on the creative work that actually requires a human eye and a practised hand.

Where I Draw the Line

My granny kept a beautiful home, everything “just so” as she’d say. Whenever we visited, our drawings and cards were out on display like a little shrine. It took me twenty years to notice there was never anything up from the cousins, and to work out why: she kept every family’s things put away and staged the right ones before each visit. Every grandchild grew up feeling they were the favourites.

When we finally copped it, we loved her more, because everything she put in front of us was real. She ran the system, and she never once hung a drawing we didn’t make. That’s the standard for the brands we produce for. AI can work as hard as it likes in the workflow, and when we show something imagined, a concept that hasn’t been built yet, it’s shown as exactly that. What your customers take to be real is real.

The creative value always lived in the vision, the direction, and the judgment, long before any camera came out of the bag. AI doesn’t replace those. If anything, it makes them matter more, because the gap in creative thinking is widening even as the technical gap narrows.

But some things should never be handed to a tool.

Your customers need to see your actual product, rather than an AI-generated version of something that looks like it. For a skincare brand, a food producer, a textile maker, the trust between what a customer sees online and what arrives at their door is everything. AI-generated product imagery breaks that trust at a fundamental level, and any short-term saving isn’t worth the long-term cost.

Your brand story needs to be real. If your strength is your heritage, your craft, your real people and real process, then the content that represents it needs to be real too. An AI-generated image of hands working wool or a fabricated workshop scene doesn’t carry the same weight as the genuine thing. Audiences are increasingly able to sense the difference. For the brands I work with, authenticity is the product itself.

Lifestyle imagery needs to feel true. When I photograph a founder in their workspace or a product being used in a real setting, the value is in the truth of that moment. AI can generate convincing-looking lifestyle scenes, but they don’t carry the specificity, the imperfection, or the genuine warmth that makes someone trust what they’re seeing. A real person wearing a real product in real light communicates something a generated image simply can’t replicate.

The Trust Line Is Real

In early 2026, a Dutch politician submitted an AI-altered portrait to a local newspaper as a photo of herself. The image made her look significantly younger and more polished. When the discrepancy surfaced, she claimed she’d only upscaled the resolution. But the output clearly wasn’t a faithful representation of her, and she knew that when she sent it. Her party expelled her. Not because she used AI, but because the trust was gone. The result of a single decision.

The same principle applies to your brand. Whether you intended to mislead barely matters once the output misrepresents reality. The AI tool will generate whatever it generates. You are the one who decides whether to use it. That’s the line. Lose your customers’ trust and it will be ten times harder to earn back than it was to build.

I take that responsibility seriously. Every AI-assisted output in our workflow goes through the same quality and honesty check as everything else. If it doesn’t represent your brand truthfully, it doesn’t go out.

Granny never once hung a drawing we didn’t make. Your customers deserve the same.

Want to talk about what a production programme could look like for your brand? See how we work with product brands through our photography services and video production, or start with a Brand Visual Strategy session to get the direction right first.