Dec. 2nd Newsletter - Welcome & Updates
Dec 2nd, 2025 - Welcomes & Updates!
Santa Cruz Holiday Market | Nov 29. 2025
Hey all,
Many of you are new to my photography work, so I wanted to give a big welcome to you - and to share some personal background + updates in this newsletter. We just wrapped up a great art/craft market out in Santa Cruz, and I enjoyed getting to chat with some of you in that beautiful part of the world.
I’m also going to chat a bit about how photography is changing more broadly, and where my work fits in. These newsletters are a recent addition to my communications, so let’s get to it!
My name is Kyle Murphy, a small-town kid from Shepparton, Australia who fell in love with cameras at age 15 (2014). After taking some high school classes, I quickly found myself drawn to natural subjects and landscape scenes.
Around the same time I started a new sport: Track & Field.
Little did I know that my athletics career would go nuclear by the conclusion of my high school studies, and it led me to become a national champ and get a full-ride college education across the world, with Harvard University’s D1 Track program. I went from snapping pics of irrigation channels and rabidly jumping into sandpits, to being thrust into a bizarre environment of high achievers, and insatiable ambitions.
That time was an absolute whirlwind. From 2018-2023, I was flown around the USA to compete while grinding out 1AM airport essays, flunking freshman math psets, and taking way too long to realise what a ‘Syllabus’ was - and that I should probably find and read them.
While soaking up as much knowledge as I could and abusing my knees in the triple jump, I took full advantage of opportunities to hold a camera and capture interesting things.
After borrowing camera gear from student photo orgs for a little longer than I should, doing under-the-table photo jobs to fund my own camera gear (I hope none of you are feds), and having a crisis about why I chose to study everything BUT photography in college, I emerged on the other side a new man. A mildly disillusioned, slightly frustrated, but otherwise grateful fella thankful for so many opportunities to grow.
There were a lot of subliminal pressures to join in the corporate parade, which after a few years studying history and our modern-day societal ailments, felt like a cop-out to my personal values. I felt that my lifelong pull toward more creative expression was something to suppress, that it is somehow not worthwhile or valuable enough among the endless other doors I watched open and close around me.
Yet, as we graduated into a world of AI fever actively training on - and attempting to push out - human creativity to feed an advertising industry, I became resolved in the belief that real expressions of human creativity and storytelling are unabashedly worthwhile.
When it comes to photography, there is a particularly interesting problem as a medium - separate from others like painting, drawing, or music.
All creative fields around the world are feeling the pinch of AI advancements right now, and photography in particular suffers from a collapsing perception of being a reliable ‘truth-telling’ format.
Photography has always existed along two distinct, broad channels: first, a tool for capturing moments from real life, a reliable impression of physical light which transformed the way society functions - from family portraits, to photojournalism, to surveillance and justice systems. The other is as a creative tool that does not exactly seek to be entirely ‘realistic’ to human perception, but uses and shapes real light in a creative way to share stories and ideas. To represent things like movements, concepts, or feelings in ways that a typical still-frame can’t.
The photographic medium has lived through many cycles of ‘its all over!’ sentiments.
New technologies have continuously improved or changed the way that images are rendered. From cheeky manipulations of film in the darkroom, to the invention of digital cameras, digital enhancement tools, and most recently fully artificially generated photorealistic images. What appears different this time, and of genuine consequence to broader societies, is the accessibility and incredible volume of artificial photographs and videos circulating the internet today.
I think this concern is summed up great by a story that a guest at this weekend’s market shared with me, where a seemingly harmless (but fake) picture of a bear walking around a small Japanese town caused real-world shutdowns and alarms + confusion for local authorities; video story here.
The AI generated image, based on a real street.
An article by Insidenova stated that “When reporters at the Yomiuri Shimbun national daily searched for the words ‘bear’ and ‘video’ on TikTok, they found that around 60 percent of 100 clips analysed were fake.” And that “‘One analysis showed the possibility was high that [the image circulating] was AI-generated, while the other said the possibility of AI was low,’ [the official] said, highlighting the difficulty of spotting increasingly realistic-looking AI images.”
Photorealistic images still hold a powerful persuasive power in the public sphere, which makes today's tools an alarming prospect when considering the levers of propaganda, political campaigns, precedent of photo evidence, and even trust in artistic integrity.
So where does my philosophy of photo-making fit into all this?
Being primarily a landscape photographer, I have always felt a high level of realism was crucial to the authenticity of my work. This is only a personal preference, and there are many amazing photographers / artists that transparently lean into the creative manipulation tools at their disposal to make amazing art.
My personal standard isn't exactly the level of pure photojournalism, which allows only basic exposure + contrast corrections, but it shares a lot with that technical process.
I find it fascinating to seek out real scenes, and frame them in a way that feels ‘unreal’. Tight, abstract compositions, bizarre behaviours of light, non-human focal lengths, etc. Take for example this series of tight-composition images:
I like to think of the camera sensor as a canvas, and light as a paintbrush.
In my favourite works I like to constrain my process to harnessing real light to intentionally produce unreal-seeming scenes. The world is filled with fantastic little stories that are waiting to be found, yet are equally content in remaining unseen.
When processing my image files, I start with standard exposure and contrast corrections. Colour values are adjusted minutely to better reflect the way my eyes perceive the scene. I almost never use ‘colour grading’, which injects new colour into shadows, midtones, or highlights. Sometimes it is appropriate, such as split-toning a black & white image to simulate the look of old film stocks.
A big area of creative liberty I take is in what is known as ‘dodging and burning’, a technique that has been harnessed since the darkroom days to alter the exposure values of specific areas of an image. With this, you can push the existing information captured to shape light as a powerful storytelling tool. To take a local legend as a prime example, Ansel Adams’ influential photographs in Yosemite showed mastery of this technique in the darkroom.
Next week I will be publishing a free comprehensive, beginner friendly guide to photography!
A lot of folks recently have been asking for tips on using cameras, as they take the leap from mobile photography to a DSLR, have upcoming travel plans, or are just keen to try a new creative outlet. Keep an eye out for this one.
Let me know what you would be interested to hear about in future newsletters - I currently have a mix of themes I’m playing around with like stories from image locations, technical guides, printmaking processes, or delving in the weeds of *ideas* present in photo works. Thanks all for your support as we begin growing a little community; I’m very keen to keep the momentum going.
If you like this newsletter and have a friend who would enjoy it, share this link:
Cheers,
Murph
Kyle Murphy Photography
Campbell, CA, USA
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