I started with a camera.

I once tested a dozen papers looking for a black with no reflection in it. Not dark. Black. The kind you cannot look away from. The printing cost more than the photograph ever earned back (two of those prints are still with me, one framed, one just lying around).

That is roughly what a photography education leaves you with. I trained at Speos in Paris and spent years on documentary work, and the useful part was never the technical part. It was learning to wait. To read a room. To know that the real moment is usually the one just before, or just after, the one everybody is watching.

Then generative tools arrived, and I could build the worlds a camera cannot reach. The ones that only exist in a script, or a memory, or a future that has not happened yet.

Most people treat these tools as a slot machine. Pull the lever, hope something beautiful falls out. I treat them as a camera. Decide the shot first, then find the way to get it.

Story first, technology second. If the idea does not work as a sentence, no amount of rendering will save it.

And the black still has to be black.