Fantasy Through Fire and Stone

The Fields of Mordor

The Digital Imaging Group of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) has been running a series of workshops exploring the photographic use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), culminating in a light-hearted competition to create up to four AI-generated images. There are two categories: Photorealistic and Fantasy/Surreal.

For the fantasy class, I decided to extend the Tolkien theme of my long-term project inspired by local mining history. Two concepts came to mind — The Fields of Mordor and Khazad-dûm, the underground kingdom of the dwarves.

Using ChatGPT, I first developed a detailed verbal description of each imagined scene. I then used Adobe’s Firefly image generator to create multiple interpretations, refining both the text prompts and the results until they matched my inner vision. The final images were then edited and polished in Photoshop.

These are clearly not photographs in the traditional sense, yet they have a photographic quality — an illusion of lens-based reality created through digital imagination.

Does This Have a Place in Photography?

I believe it does — but perhaps in a different corner of the photographic world. AI image generation doesn’t replace photography; rather, it extends the photographer’s ability to visualise. The skills involved — composition, lighting, atmosphere, storytelling — remain the same. What changes is the toolset. Just as photographers once moved from film to digital sensors, some of us are now exploring light that has never existed, yet feels as though it might have.

For me, these experiments don’t diminish photography — they expand its boundaries.

The Underground Kingdom